


The Reorg

by I Am Your Spy (GroteskBurlesque)



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Blood and Gore, Cecil is Inhuman, Character Death, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Mind Control, Strexcorp, Strexcorp is Evil, Tentacles, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-16
Updated: 2015-02-03
Packaged: 2018-02-25 15:13:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 23
Words: 53,012
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2626379
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GroteskBurlesque/pseuds/I%20Am%20Your%20Spy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Carlos finds a way out of the desert. That way is through StrexCorp.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. In the Desert

Somewhere that is not here is a desert that is not this one. It stretches beyond the scope of geographical probability. It sweeps, vast and mostly still, across stone ruins, littered with bone, beneath the shadow of the mountain, and its howling-if-compliant winds keep time with the blinking light at its peak. 

In that desert, a scientist stands, waiting. He has been in the desert for months. He does not remember how long he has been in the desert. His hair has grown long (a forbidden thought stirs at this— _someone_ would have liked it—and the scientist pushes the thought away roughly, almost cruelly, and hates himself all the more for that) and, without conventional methods of grooming or styling, he has fashioned it into a crude, messy ponytail with bound with rags torn from his lab coat. Strands of black and silver pull loose in the hot wind, and he pushes them out of his face.

He squints up at the bright sky, shading his eyes, the skin of his hand cracked and splitting. He feels the helicopter’s presence before he sees it—first, as a distant yellow fleck below a yellow sun, then closer, its propeller blades beating dust and heat into a cyclone as it lands with the grace of a paraplegic elephant.

The scientist rubs grit from his eyes. Swallows, though his throat is dry, has been for so long that he’s forgotten how it felt not to be thirsty. He faces the yellow helicopter that thrums, several yards away, in the swirling pink sands.

A woman stands at the door of the helicopter. She is slender and has hair the color of honey; in her high heels she is as tall as he is. She is wearing a business suit and carrying a clipboard, neat, as cool and refreshing as the tall glass of water that he doesn’t have. He crosses the last distance, dropping his cell phone as he does, in the exposed ribs of a long-dead beast, and fails to stop himself from casting a backwards glance at its wallpaper, a woodcarving of something that, to an imagination more libertine than most, might be called a cat. He promises himself that this stolen glance will be the last time he thinks about the cat. He is pulled into the body of the helicopter. The woman’s smile is too wide for what is about to happen.

About the smile of the man seated next to her, it is best to say nothing at all. 

“Are you ready?” the woman asks. He thinks of his cell phone, lost to the desert. He has shed every skin but the physical, and even that is dry and peeling. 

“I am ready,” he replies, feeling that the occasion is oddly formal and does not call for contractions. He can feel the other man, an undulating, coiling presence in the corner of his consciousness. He is not thinking about who the other man resembles. How the nose is right, and the hair, a little, but the eyes…

If he turns only slightly, only half-looks, he can see the man’s eyes, or where they should be, coiling steam rising from twin black holes like the aftermath of a missile strike. He focuses instead on the woman, who looks like no one other than herself. 

A scientist does not dwell in ironies, so he tries not to remember the person who taught him to not-look and to not-think. They’d held hands and walked past the Dog Park, and the scientist had practiced seeing-but-not-seeing as though his life depended on it, just as right now, he is carefully not thinking of anyone in particular. The voice in his head that says, cheerfully, “If you see something, say nothing, and drink to forget” belongs to _someone_ , but that’s as far as he lets it go. It’s good advice, he thinks; anyone might have said it.

The woman holds out the clipboard. From some instinct unearthed after centuries in the desert, he wants to reach for a pen.

Whiplash quick, the man hunched beside him strikes out and bites his index finger with snaggletoothed fangs. He cries out, in shock more than pain, droplets of scarlet plopping onto the crisp white paper.

 _Blood_ , he thinks, _it would have to be blood._

The man licks his lips, chuckles to himself, and retreats into the shadowed crevice of the helicopter. The scientist can feel the helicopter rumbling as the propeller comes alive again, stirring the air in lazy whorls until it thickens and turns white.

“It’s time,” the woman says. From somewhere behind her, she produces a bottle of orange juice and hands it to him.

“It is time,” he agrees, the end of the sentence forced into a shout by the helicopter’s rattling ascent. He twists open the lid, lets the liquid trickle down his parched throat.  He has been thirsty for so very long.

When he has finished, far above the desert with reality flickering in and out before his dazed eyes, she reaches a long, slim hand to shake his own. Her skin is colder than anything he’s felt in months. He shakes her hand vigorously, efficiently. A scientist is always professional. 

“Welcome,” she shouts, “to StrexCorp.”


	2. Subject 37

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's New Employee Orientation Day at StrexCorp Synergists, Inc.

Lauren is not a scientist, but she likes to believe that she has a scientific curiosity, a burning drive to understand the inner mechanics of the world. 

To wit, the differences between Kevin and Cecil that she is certain about are as follows:

  * Kevin’s voice is higher, the way Cecil’s would have been if the thing hadn’t happened when he was 15.
  * Kevin doesn’t have three eyes. Well. Not anymore.
  * Kevin has a much better sense of interior décor.
  * Kevin does not come from a town with municipally mandated dental care.
  * Kevin does not have tentacles.
  * Kevin is not, at present, being held against his will in a high-tech laboratory located in the basement of the new StrexCorp Synergists Inc. Distribution Center.



As for the rest—among other theories, she is almost convinced that Kevin isn’t gay. If Kevin has any desires that remain, they are channeled, exclusively, into productivity and positive thinking. Once, years ago, she’d fucked him to see what it was like, and he’d been as mechanical and efficient as Daniel. She’d admired that in him, but hadn’t cared to repeat the experience. What that says about genetic determinism or lack thereof, well, she would need more data to speculate.

She has never tried to look at Cecil out of the corner of her vision to see if his eyes are really there or just a collective belief that stems from an understanding that it’s better to just pretend that they are. She suspects that was what the head of their R&D team had tried, and why StrexCorp’s science division had—if only for very briefly—a vacancy.

Their new scientist is so enthusiastic about his position that he might practically have been a native of Desert Bluffs himself. He is so keen to begin that he suggests skipping through the rest of his orientation, the tedious obligatory introductions to various management personnel, and even a shower and change of clothes, in the hopes of, so he says, examining Subject 37. Lauren appreciates his zeal and makes a show of ushering him through the halls before pausing, as if by afterthought, in front of her office.

“There is,” she says, “just this one thing.”

Carlos consents, though his smile, so eager a moment ago, is failing at the corners. The device, silvery and narrow and shaped like a centipede, is almost unnoticeable beneath his waves of black hair, clinging to the back of his perfectly formed skull like the spider that is somewhere on your person right now.

“We value open and transparent communication,” she burbles. “We’ll know where you are and what you’re thinking at all times. Isn’t that great?”

“Great,” Carlos repeats. There’s a hiss, and then a low hum, as the device activates. He’s braver than most; flinches, but doesn’t scream. It’s as if he’s expecting it. Her respect for him grows by increments.

“This way,” she says.

 

* * *

 

Carlos looks, but doesn’t look, at Subject 37, just like he learned to do in Night Vale. 

Subject 37 is strapped to a gurney in one of the many identical rooms in the laboratory. They’ve taken to strapping his tentacles down as well, after the Unfortunate Incident with the former head of R&D. Carlos absorbs this as though it is yet another interesting observation. Subject 37 is a monster that thinks it’s a man, a creature that can steal a stray scalpel from a tray of instruments with an unsupervised (and generally retracted) prehensile pseudo-limb, but decides to transfer it to his hand before slitting the throat of the scientist experimenting on him. Subject 37, Carlos is told, got as far as the back stairwell of the Distribution Center before security found him, subdued him, and brought him back.

The marks of his capture are still visible where the thin hospital gown doesn’t cover his skin. Carlos catalogues them methodically, noting placement, colour, size. He speculates on how each was made. He very carefully does not think of how, when this is all over, he will inflict matching injuries on every member of StrexCorp’s senior management. The device clinging to his head crackles; a warning. He does not test the boundaries of what can and cannot be thought.

Two of Subject 37’s eyes blink, out of sync. The third is swollen shut. Lying on his back, beaten, without his glasses, and—Carlos can only assume—in excruciating pain, it takes him a while to notice that someone new has entered the room.

Carlos is allowed this much: He whirls, furious, to face Lauren and hisses, “I need him intact.”

“He’ll live,” she says, placid. “Anything else?” 

Through clenched teeth he manages: “It’s hard to work with distraction, even your own pleasant company.”

“I’ll be just outside,” she assures him, knocking on the one-way glass as though to remind him that the foundation is solid, that it will stand anything he can throw at it.

And then they’re alone, for the first time in nearly a year. He forces himself to take slow, measured paces to Cecil’s (not Cecil’s, as the device purrs at the base of his skull, Subject 37’s), bed. 

He is a scientist. He observes. He draws conclusions. That is what a scientist does.

Subject 37 is male. Neither fat nor thin. Shorter than Carlos, if he were standing, which he is not. Mostly bruises, partially unmarked skin.

Very little movement. 

One of the tentacles lashes weakly against the surface of the gurney. _Uncategorized humanoid entity,_ Carlos thinks, and doesn’t add, _unique in the known universe,_ because statistically speaking, however he feels, that is almost certainly untrue. He places two fingers against the slender appendage, stilling it. Cecil’s head flops to the side, right and center eyes, dark and white respectively, fixed on his face.

“Carlos.” His voice has been hollowed out, leaving behind only its fragile eggshell casing, but unmistakable for all its frailty. “My sweet, beautiful C—”

Carlos stops him there. Stops _it_. The device hungers, prowling at the corners of his consciousness for forbidden thoughts. “I am going to examine you,” he says, snapping on a pair of latex gloves. One does not ask consent of a research subject. One might as well ask consent of a clock, or a lightning storm. “You are of scientific interest to StrexCorp.” Cecil moans, a tiny, pitiful sound, and Carlos would have done _anything_ to comfort him except the device in his head springs to life at this, a warning shock through the plates of his skull and the nerve endings up his spine.

He assures it, and the ones listening, that he is a scientist. He has only objective, professional interest. He serves science, and he serves StrexCorp.

Cecil isn’t in his right mind, if he’s ever been in anything of that description, but he sees Carlos’ wince and seems to understand. He whispers, “Neat,” and something in Carlos shatters. 

It’s difficult to conduct any sort of examination while pointedly not-looking at your subject, but Carlos has experience. It would, he thinks, be nice if he could also not-hear his subject, but Cecil starts weeping, very quietly but audible in the stillness of the laboratory, almost as soon as Carlos’ latex-sheathed hands tentatively shift a stray curl of hair away from a bloody gash at his temple. 

He thinks, step one is to get the lab sterilized if they even understand such a concept here, one can’t experiment with the specter of cross-contamination looming, and Cecil never could abide a mess. Maybe they can move him somewhere else in the meantime. Maybe there’s a part of this facility that isn’t soaked in slippery viscera and they could put him there until the lab meets with Carlos’s exacting specifications.

He wipes clean—basically clean—several pieces of medical equipment on the edge of his new, yellow lab coat. Checks pulse and blood pressure, though he’s not sure what’s within the range of normal for eldritch abominations, and he’s a scientist, not a doctor. He spends longer than he probably should listening to Cecil’s heart, which is definitely beating faster than it should be, for the purposes of later comparison and not because the cold touch of a stethoscope against his burning skin seems to be what finally calms Cecil down.

Next, paranoid at even the lightest touch, he inventories the subject’s physical condition, dictating into an old-fashioned tape-recorder a litany of cracked ribs, mangled tentacles stiff with clotting blood and ichor, taser burns and badly sewn lacerations. Lauren is right; it’s nothing he won’t survive, his survival is, in fact, key to Their plans, whatever it is They have planned. He releases the most severely maimed tentacle from its restraint and lets it rest, curled like a blackened fiddlehead, on his gloved palm while he observes its properties. It’s boneless, all muscle and clusters of nerve endings, a shade darker than the rest of his skin. Incredibly sensitive (Carlos pushes the memories of how he knows this as far down as he can manage), which is why he normally keeps them retracted. He can’t, now, or they won’t let him. As gently as he can, he tests to see whether there’s still feeling in the pseudo-limb, tracing a finger in a spiral over the smooth skin. Cecil moans again, closes his eyes and murmurs, distant, dreamily, “I knew you’d come. I knew you’d rescue me.”

“I am not,” Carlos says, “here to rescue you.” Which is true-true, not just pretend-true, and the device at the back of his head hums happily at the lack of cognitive dissonance. “I work for StrexCorp now. I have a contract and everything.” He rubs at the scab on his fingertip where Kevin bit him.

Despite the pain, despite his boyfriend’s betrayal, Cecil’s cracked lips smile. “Okay,” he says, and the tentacle whips around Carlos’s hand and squeezes affectionately. “Nobody’s perfect.”

Any longer, he thinks, and he’ll break; his instinct will overpower his training and he won’t be able to stop himself from grabbing Cecil and running, and it’ll all be over and they’ll both be dead. He unwinds the tentacle and places it back in its restraint. Cecil doesn’t resist or so much as open his eyes. He must be exhausted. For a few brief minutes, Carlos had dangled hope in front of him, and now even that’s gone. 

“Do you think anyone’s feeding Khoshekh?” Cecil asks suddenly. “Someone would have to, wouldn’t they? They couldn’t just let him starve.” 

“I have to finish the orientation.” Carlos’s voice is flat, dull. He doesn’t remember who Khoshehk is. There was never anyone named Khoshekh.

“You’ll come back, won’t you, my dear Carlos?” When Carlos doesn’t answer, even when he heads for the door where Lauren is waiting, he adds, “I know you’ll come back.”

Whatever Cecil says after is lost as the door swings shut behind him.


	3. Negotiations

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> StrexCorp makes an opening offer. Tamika tries to be law-abiding for once.

_Carlos had been lying by a dying fire under the desert stars, three months ago, when they’d first made contact. He’d tried Cecil, but the phone had rang and rang until he’d reached voicemail, and whatever words he’d thought to say fled him._

I love you, _he’d thought, after._ I miss you. _These would have been fine to say. Cecil’s absence was a sharp, bright pain in his chest, hardly noticeable in movement, agonizing in stillness. He’s told himself that Cecil must have been suffering less; at least he had his town, and his friends. Carlos had inconclusive tests and endless sand._

_It was cold at night in the desert. He tucked his freezing hands into the openings of his sleeves, gripped his own wrists. Cold, and dark, and when he’d heard the helicopter, he’d thought—so very foolishly—that it was the vague-yet-menacing government agency, that somehow, miraculously, Night Vale had found him._

_“Are you here to kill me?” he’d asked, when it was clear that this wasn’t the case._

_Kevin had laughed, and, after a pause, Lauren had laughed too. It had been worse, that first time, because in the faint glow of the last embers and as long as he didn’t speak, Carlos couldn’t see all the little ways in which Kevin didn’t really resemble Cecil at all._

_“Goodness, no,” Kevin had said, and at least his voice was lighter, happier, than Cecil’s could ever be, unburdened with whatever it was that Cecil saw through his third eye. “We’re here to offer you a job. Aren’t we, Lauren?”_

_“That’s right,” she’d said, slipping into her co-host rhythm. “The way we see it, Carlos, you’ve been in the desert for months. Doing science, sure, but who does it benefit? What have you_ produced _,_ _Carlos?_ Are you achieving your fullest potential? _”_

_Despite himself, he’d started to rattle off his various experiments, and she’d pressed right up against him, a manicured finger closing his lips._

_“You’ve been_ aimless _,_ _” Lauren had purred. “As I understand it, you’ve given up on ever going back to Night Vale.”_

 _“You’re here to take me to_ Night Vale. _” He’d known what they were, what they were capable of, what they’d put Cecil through during their reign of terror. A scientist is objective, but a scientist is also not a trusting fool. “You’re my benefactors, then?”_

_“You could say that,” Kevin had said, and the corners of his mouth peeled back, revealing teeth like a rotting wood fence._

_“We want you to come work for us,” Lauren had said. “We have an exciting new project that I’m sure will just_ thrill _you, and state-of-the-art facilities, and it’s all just_ super _, really. You’ll love it. Or you’ll learn to love it. Eventually. With the proper_ motivation.”

_Carlos had eyed the circle of stones around the fire, and calculated how quickly he could move to grab one, if need be, and the force in newtons required to bring it down on Lauren’s head hard enough to knock her out or kill her. “Go fuck yourselves,” he’d said. “Both of you.”_

_“It’s about incentive,” Kevin had replied thoughtfully. “He doesn’t have any. You need incentive to keep a workplace running at peak efficiency.”_

_Lauren had appeared to consider this. Her finger moved from where it hovered by Carlos’ face to his shoulder. She stroked the length of his arm. He shuddered._

_“You’re right, Kevin,” she'd admitted. “Silly me, I’d forgotten the most important part of the deal. Carlos, lovely Carlos.” She’d paused, then. She was a radio professional too; she knew how to be theatrical. “We have Cecil.”_

 

* * *

  

At first it’s hours of static, then days of repeats, then, to Tamika’s horror, endless StrexCorp ads and Kevin’s newly syndicated community radio show. She goes to the station first and catches a glimpse of Cecil’s car with its NVCR and NRA bumper stickers, covered in a week’s worth of dust and sand. She flees.

 _If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself—_ this is the quote with which she consoles herself— _you are certain to be in peril._ Tamika is no coward, but this is no time to fight, not until she knows more. 

She turns to the mayor next, and that’s initially promising. Dana likes Cecil, he’s her friend, or was, before City Council ensured that friends weren’t something she got to have. Dana hasn’t heard from Cecil in days but the crack in her office wall, which oozes an unknown brown liquid in a shape that she swears bears a passing similarity to Kenny Loggins, has—she claims—some interesting things to say.

“Well,” Tamika asks. “Where is he?”

“Oh.” Dana is looking somewhere. Not at Tamika, or the prophetic crack in her office wall. Just—somewhere, as if asking for permission.  “Not about _that._ ” 

She even knocks on the door of Cecil’s sister and brother-in-law. Steve starts talking about government cover-ups and arrows in the sky but Carol hushes her and offers Tamika hot cocoa. Tamika resigns herself to an hour and a half of sitting on the floor with little Janice, helping her cook napalm to prepare for her Urban Warfare Girl Guide badge.

At last, in a bout of existential despair worthy of Camus, she lifts the receiver of the rotary phone in her living room and tells the Sheriff’s Secret Police that she’d like to report a missing person. They arrive promptly (she suspects that they were in the shed in the backyard, which is where they usually camp out) with a stack of paperwork, which Tamika dutifully begins to fill out with a can of molding tomato paste and a dry stick of gluten-free linguine that keeps breaking, until one of the policewomen interrupts her to ask if this is about Cecil Palmer.

“You _know?”_

“Of course we do,” the policewoman says haughtily. “We know everything.” 

Tamika curls her tomato-stained fingers into fists and glares, hands on hips, at the two officers. “Where is he?”

“Station Management said something about a reorg.” 

“What’s a reorg?” 

“It’s when,” her companion says, “you have an org, like a radio station, I assume, and then you…” She trails off.

“You don’t know where he is either, do you?”

The two adults look at each other, and then the first policewoman gives an exaggerated shrug and hands her a flask. Tamika opens it and sniffs, then wrinkles her face in disgust. She can imagine the rueful expression behind the woman’s balaclava. 

“Whisky?”

“It’ll help,” the policewoman says. 

“With everything,” her companion agrees.

“I’m _fourteen years old._ ”

The policewoman takes her flask back, hands Tamika another set of papers that have to be filed by Wednesday, and leaves with her companion.

Tamika puts the paperwork on the coffee table and slumps on the couch, her face buried in her hands. Grown-ups are useless. She’s known this all her life; it is a rule you must understand completely if you want to live long enough to get a driver’s license. To this rule there has only ever been one exception, one rock of certainty in her young life. There has only ever been one adult who, through everything, believed in her to the point of risking his own life to help her.

And now he’s gone. Disappeared, like so many others they collectively forget about because that’s the only way to keep going, and no one wants to talk about it. Tamika doesn’t need to talk about it. She _knows_. Cecil was under Station Management’s protection, his position written in prophecy, which was why, no matter how far over the line he steps sometimes, they’d never taken him off the air. She knows, in her heart, that the reorg isn’t something they’ve done. And she knows of only one force in the known universe that would dare fuck with _them._  

Later, she’ll never mention it to anyone, but upon finding herself completely and utterly on her own, Tamika Flynn clutches the severed hand around her neck for comfort, throws herself against her mother’s crocheted throw pillows, and cries. It is all happening again. StrexCorp is back, and this time they’ve struck the preemptive blow. This time, there’s no Cecil to rally the town against them. There are no warriors or angels. There is just Tamika.

She allows herself thirty seconds of tears, then wipes her eyes and nose with her sleeve. That’s all the time she has for self-pity. Now it’s time to plan. Night Vale depends on her.

After all, she tells herself, everyone has to grow up sometime.


	4. The Subtle Bomb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A scientist must compartmentalize.

_Carlos did not sign a contract with StrexCorp to rescue Cecil._

_Back in the desert, even when Lauren had told him, in garish Technicolor detail, exactly what they would do to Cecil if Carlos didn’t accept their offer, he’d resisted. He’d charted the time differences. It couldn’t have been more than a day or two since he’d last spoken to Cecil, and Cecil had said nothing about StrexCorp then. He’d talked about the latest drama at the PTA meeting, and two new flavors at the Pinkberry that both sounded absolutely disgusting, and how he’d seen Megan Wallaby out with her doctors, learning how to walk and speak and pet small dogs without crushing their spines. And then Cecil had laughed, high and nervous, and his voice had broken just a little, and he’d said that he wished Carlos could be there to try the Evaporated Seahorse gelato with him, recovered just as immediately and went on to talk about his cat._

_It was, Carlos thought, entirely possible that he was fine. Or as fine as he could be, living under the shadow of an oppressive municipal bureaucracy with his boyfriend trapped in another dimension. After all, he usually didn’t pick up when Carlos called; telecommunications across parallel temporal streams was, much to Carlos’s eternal regret and annoyance, not an exact science. It was entirely possible that his babbling about Evaporated Seahorse gelato wasn’t actually some obscure Night Valian code for being held hostage by an evil corporatist dystopia that Carlos was just expected to somehow_ know _._

_“I don’t believe you,” he’d said, and Lauren had shrugged in her cool, businesslike way, and motioned Kevin back into the helicopter._

_Time passed._

_They returned, a week later, with a video. It was 58 seconds long. It showed Cecil, strapped to a gurney, thrashing under repeated electric shocks. Carlos had watched, fled to the shadows where he’d fallen on his knees and retched cactus fruit and roasted lizard into the sand._

_He’d still said no. A scientist does not give into intimidation._

_He’d turned to Doug instead. The huge masked warrior had listened to his story, nodding in places. StrexCorp had tried to move into the desert, once. Doug’s tribe had resisted. The bones of their once-great civilization, defaced and defiled by the symbols of the Smiling God, lay in ruins scattered across the desert hellscape, but in the end, they had_ won _._  

_“What is it,” Carlos had asked, the next time Lauren and Kevin came to see him, “that you want me to do?”_

_They had told him._

_That time, Carlos hadn’t said no. He’d said, “Give me a month to think about it.”_

_Kevin had looked to Lauren. “I don’t know,” he’d told her. “Do you think Cecil will last another month?”_

_“A month of my time,” Carlos had clarified. “That’s…about three days for you, isn’t it? He can last three days?” He’d felt sick, knowing what he was condemning Cecil to. Three_ seconds _would have been too long._

 _They’d gone back to their helicopter, but they’d kept their word. They’d given him his month, every day of which he’d spent locking his terror and his love into a locked box, buried at the bottom of his subconscious. He spent long, sleepless hours training himself to not-see and not-feel. A scientist is good at compartmentalization. A scientist_ must _compartmentalize. Carlos had spent most of his life, until Night Vale, until Cecil with his awkward on-air declarations of love, learning to compartmentalize._

_Because he knows, and he hates that he knows it, but as much as they want to destroy Cecil, he’s only the means to an end. They want Carlos for something much greater._

_They want him for_ this _._

 

* * *

 

 

 _This_ is a weapon, and even as Aviva, the department’s chief mechanical engineer, is expounding upon its various features, Carlos is consumed with a creeping, prickling sense of dread. It’s weirdly familiar, this dread. 

When Carlos was in college, one of his classmates held monthly movie nights in her dorm room, where she’d play old civil defense films from the 50s on an ancient reel-to-reel projector that she’d rescued from the dusty basement of the Astrophysics building. Carlos and his friends sang along to “Duck and Cover” and tossed popcorn at the screen, but years later, he’d find himself dreaming of Doomsday Clocks and the Elephant’s Foot and would wake feeling like he’d been hollowed out, overwhelmed at the ephemeral nature of existence. 

(He’d had that nightmare once in Night Vale, before there were other horrors to occupy his sleeping mind. Cecil, being Cecil, had taken it in stride and assured him that nightmares were simply the future helping you to prepare for everything it had to offer you.)

StrexCorp Synergists Inc. does not—fortunately—literally have nuclear capabilities, but it has something. That something doesn’t work yet, which is why Carlos is here, with a six-figure contract and a boyfriend taken hostage for his good behaviour. They have a weapon, and it is powerful and serious and _horrible,_ and it is aimed—metaphorically speaking, for the moment—right at Night Vale.

They call it the Subtle Bomb, though Aviva quickly appends that the marketing division is working around the clock and consulting with numerous focus groups on the branding. It’s a quieter, gentler sort of genocide. Townicide. A conventional economic takeover had been unsuccessful, so now, as Aviva puts it, they will all _sleep, sleep for a while, and dream our dreams of a Smiling God._ It takes Carlos time to grasp the implications. Despite everything he’s seen, up to and including beings that were almost definitely not angels, he has never believed in any sort of god, smiling or otherwise. He doesn’t see why the relatively nonviolent, if forced, religious conversion of a city matters all that much in the greater scheme of things.

Then Aviva invites him to look through the targeting mechanism, inoperative at the moment, but not entirely _inactive,_ and so he peers through the device at its glowing yellow heart. 

Hours later, once he’s stopped screaming and can see past the blood leaking through his tear ducts, Kevin comes to find him. Carlos wipes at his eyes with the sleeve of his coat, streaking reddish brown over the bright fabric, and blinks until he can focus again. Kevin skitters around the frame of the doorway, moving sideways so that he’s always in half-light beneath the flickering fluorescent overhead lights. He cocks his head to one side like a bird or a particularly friendly tarantula. In photographs, Carlos thinks, he probably looks entirely human.

“Have you settled down?” Kevin asks, and Carlos really, _really_ wishes he wouldn’t smile. Or come any closer. Or _sniff,_ still smiling, at the blood trickling from Carlos’s eyes and nostrils, licking at his lips. “Can I remove the restraints now?”

“Please,” Carlos says weakly. Kevin unfastens the buckles one by one, and Carlos sits up, rubbing at his wrists, fully convinced that the only thing keeping him from lunging at Kevin and throttling him is that, try as he might, he can’t put his hands around a throat that looks exactly like Cecil’s.

A blast of pain spikes through his neck and skull, and he sways forward. Kevin catches him before he can go toppling over. 

“Time to get back to work!” he chirps, slinging an arm around Carlos’s shoulders and leading him back down the hall. Eyeless, smiling office workers lift their heavy heads as he passes, and up-tempo but nondescript instrumental music pipes in from speakers embedded in the ceiling.

It’s _this_ that has been waiting for him, since the day he set foot in Night Vale, maybe even before. It’s waited, half-completed, for him to breath life into its Frankenstein’s monster corpse, a Sleeping Beauty that will wake to unravel all things. He has always, unwittingly and now quite wittingly, been the hand of the Smiling God. The one—as Kevin explains—fated to destroy everything Night Vale is, always and forever.

Kevin leans in as if to kiss him, instead licking a stripe of drying blood from his cheek. 

“We’ve been waiting for you,” he says. “For so long. So very long. Come on, now, friend, there’s work to be done.”


	5. Strategies

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Language is the first tool of subversion.

Cecil can hear Carlos screaming. StrexCorp hasn't invested in soundproofing, which, given that their budget is as vast as the Void is endless, he suspects is by design. 

He’s been thinking about hypotheses. There’s not much else to do, strapped to a bed and convinced that every one of the pain receptors that 53% of the population was born without has somehow been transferred to his body and pressed into service. Besides, scientists like hypotheses, so Carlos would be proud that Cecil is now testing out several of his own. 

Hypothesis #1: Carlos isn’t Carlos. If Dana had a double (or if Dana _is_ her double) and Kevin is—he doesn’t want to think this, but people keep mentioning it—Cecil’s own double, then it stands to reason that the man he saw might be Carlos’s double.

Cecil doesn’t want to believe this, first because he desperately _does_ want Carlos to really be here, and also because there’s no doubt in his mind that Carlos knew him. In every possible sense of the word, and even if he’d pretended otherwise and gone cold and strange and only touched him through gloves. It was still the first touch he’d felt in weeks that wasn’t meant to cause him pain. There is a lot he doesn’t understand about the world but he is entirely certain that he’d recognize Carlos’s touch even through a latex barrier. Which leads to:

Hypothesis #2: Carlos has actually betrayed him and Night Vale both, and gone to work for StrexCorp. Which, Cecil thinks, is something that a regular person might do when they are sick to death of their danger-meter constantly being in the red and catching throat-spider infections and being attacked by entire tiny, vicious civilizations, and dating a genuine—if oddly ebullient—Lovecraftian monster. Normally, this is the kind of completely irrational thought that Cecil tries his hardest to repress, but there were all of those months in the desert, and all the phone calls Carlos forgot to make, and the oak doors he never bothered to find, and stupid _Doug_ — _ugh—_ with his stupid inscrutable mask _._ In Cecil’s rather extensive experience, boyfriends tended to break up with you by a) abruptly changing their Facebook status to “single” and only then calling with a somber, “we need to talk,” or b) running shrieking when they see your transdimensional form reflected in the bathroom mirror that they were _supposed_ to cover when you came over—but then again, he’s never actually dated anyone like Carlos before. Carlos is not very direct. He is dashing and mysterious, and also _immensely frustrating,_ that way.

But then, Carlos had yelled at Lauren— _Lauren_ —for hurting him, and then held his tentacle and stroked it, which he knew was Cecil’s third-favorite thing, and he’d looked like he was in pain rather than angry, like something was controlling him. Accordingly:

Hypothesis #3: Carlos is here against his will, and StrexCorp has done something to him, reeducated him or broken him or threatened him and Cecil thinks betrayal would be easier, at least he could properly hate Carlos rather than contemplate the prospect that his beloved has suffered even a fraction of what StrexCorp is capable of doing to a person. His train of thought, at this, takes a sharp turn towards the psychotically homicidal or roboticidal or whatever you call the frenzied slaughter of any sentient creature that may have theoretically harmed one glorious hair on his Carlos’s perfectly coiffed head. Cecil’s never killed anyone—well, at least not directly—until he was brought here, and even that was an improvised, haphazard affair, but he’s sure he’s capable of it. That must have been what Carlos had meant, when he’d said he wasn’t here to rescue Cecil. Cecil is here to rescue _him._

 _Okay,_ he thinks, _okay, I can do this._ He’s currently tied up and suspects that the IV hooked to his arm is what’s making him weak and groggy, but it’s a matter of willpower and the unstoppable, unquantifiable force of _true love,_ and he struggles with everything he has because the screaming is louder and, to his despair, he knows _exactly_ what Carlos’s screams sound like and there’s no mistaking _that_ either.

The restraints bite into his wrists, ankles, and chest. He doesn’t even try to free any tentacles; the slightest twitch of them is pure agony. Struggle seems to just tighten his bonds. Self-tightening restraints, he thinks, are exactly the kind of mechanism that StrexCorp would invent and Station Management would try to steal. Defeated, he slumps back against the gurney and mumbles a miserable, unheard apology to Carlos, which of course is when the daily barrage of StrexCorp commercials comes to life on the massive TV screen mounted low enough above his bed that his myopic eyes catch every detail.

He is, he decides (not for the first time, but as a career working under Station Management has taught him, repetition is habit-forming), going to destroy them all. They will wander, broken, across the Sand Wastes and find Telly the Barber trimming cactus spines and think to themselves that this man is _lucky,_ that his drooling, gibbering madness is a kind fate by comparison _._ By the time Cecil’s finished with them, he thinks, they will _wish_ they’d killed him. And then they will wish he’d killed _them._

Just as soon as he can get out of these restraints.

 

* * *

 

Carlos is used to work, long hours in the lab over bubbling test tubes and Petri dishes that breed, for no apparent reason, a host of centipedes or tiny, matte black cubes regardless of the culture he puts in it. He has never, however, worked as much as he does in those first hours—or days, or weeks, there’s no real way to tell—for StrexCorp. It’s as if he’s grown several extra pairs of hands (he actually has to look down to make sure this isn’t the case) and each is accelerated into a time-lapsed fury. He works, and with every task he does, a ghost of a half-remembered reflex undoes that work, and thus, working his ass off as he has never done before, he manages to be completely unproductive.

This, he promises himself, is the real reason he came.

No one who works for StrexCorp’s R&D division has determined why the Subtle Bomb does not function as advertised. They need an outsider for that. Aviva lost half a dozen junior scientists before realizing that no true believer in the Smiling God is capable of debugging the targeting mechanism without losing all higher cognitive function. This fills Carlos with a grim satisfaction that makes the device at the back of his skull crackle unhappily. But the upshot is that so long as his own acts of sabotage remain reflexive and unconscious, so long as no one else understands enough about how the weapon works to question him, and he doesn’t think too much about how long he can get away with it before the information leaks into his conscious mind, he’s able to carry out his un-work and delay, if not prevent, Night Vale’s unraveling. 

When he sinks to his knees, his hands shaking too badly to hold the diagnostic instruments, he is dragged back to his room and is at last permitted to sleep.

Carlos dreams in Unmodified Sumerian, which Doug taught him and which, he is assured, not a single person in Desert Bluffs speaks. Language is the first tool of subversion. (Even now, his thoughts of Cecil are untranslatable into Spanish, belonging to a different plane of existence from his childhood of dead-end alleys and crowded kitchens. He’s only ever said, “I love you” in English.) 

Even behind the stone fortress of translation and lucid dreaming, he does not permit himself to think about Cecil. Desire tugs at his sleeve like a neglected puppy but he knows it’s too dangerous; Cecil’s very presence in the building is a crack in his walls. If he loses concentration even for a second, Cecil is sitting on the hood of Carlos’s Prius dressed like a 90s rave vomited all over him. He’s lying on his garish purple bedspread, ankles wrapped around Carlos’s back, grinning his crooked, dorky smile like he still can’t believe this is happening to him. He’s at the radio station, hunched over antediluvian radio equipment, sleeves rolled up past his elbows, pushing curls of black hair out of his third eye, and every bit the most beautiful thing Carlos has ever seen. Carlos banishes these images, though the pain of doing so is killing him by degrees.

Instead, he is as productive in his dreams as he is in waking life. He generates algorithms, muscle-memory for sabotage, counter-routines buried beneath routines, all designed to do nothing but hold the weapon’s development in place and buy everyone a little more time. He programs his own body for inertia. His hands will move with a will opposite to his brain and he will save the world (or, well, Night Vale, anyway) through inaction.

That’s Phase One of the plan. Phase One means that he’s out of the desert and Cecil is alive. But it doesn’t mean that either of them is free, or that Night Vale is safe. For that, he need something more—a line to the outside world.

He needs—he realizes it with a shuddering sensation just before waking—the radio station. 

Which means that he needs to take advantage of StrexCorp’s weak link. He needs Kevin.


	6. There's No Eye In Team

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carlos tries to get on Kevin's good side. It goes about as well as you'd think.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize in advance.

Getting up the nerve to approach—and then somehow impress and bedazzle—Kevin is more difficult than it had seemed in his sleep. 

For one thing, Carlos is terrible at talking to people, and particularly terrible at talking to men he finds attractive. He’s atrocious at it, in fact. His pre-Cecil love life was basically a Fibonacci sequence of ever-greater humiliations. The only reason he’s ever gotten laid in his entire life is because the sheer staggering diversity of the global mammalian population ensues that there is an extant, if drastically limited, supply of sentient beings like Cecil who will loudly and publicly declare that they would like to bone him. He literally needs it announced over the radio. Carlos has to date outside his _species_ in order to find someone who can look beyond his bouts of tongue-tiedness and general social ineptitude. There is zero guarantee that out of the vast spectrum of humanity and inhumanity, Kevin is someone he can approach, with all that entails, without making a complete ass of himself.

For another, there is zero guarantee that Kevin is even amenable to his advances, or is that gullible or easily distractible. (Yes, Kevin licked him, but does Kevin lick everyone? Kevin probably licks everyone.) He can’t even begin to theorize about the complex genetic and environmental factors that would make one person attracted to him and not another, and this gets even more complicated in the case of two people who are so identical and yet so horrifyingly _not_ , so there’s no reason to assume that the whole “seduce Kevin and get him to put Carlos on the radio show” idea—which had seemed like _pure genius_ in his dreams the previous night—will actually work in practice.

And then there’s the fact that he’s still so hopelessly in love with Cecil that the thought of so much as flirting with anyone else is repulsive. He can only imagine Cecil’s opinion of his plan. Cecil may be prone to near-fatal bouts of civic-mindedness, but Carlos imagines he wouldn’t exactly approve of his boyfriend pimping himself out to his evil twin in order to save Night Vale from the weaponized love of a Smiling God.

Oh yes, and there’s the fact that Kevin fucking _terrifies_ him. There is that.

But his dreaming mind has not suggested a more practical, achievable plan, such as one that involves literal chemistry rather than one that relies upon Carlos’s tragically limited reserves of the figurative sort, so here he is, slinking around the Desert Bluffs Radio Incorporated, in the pale, weary hours that pass for night in a town that never sleeps. Kevin is more of a workaholic than Carlos and his entire team put together, but he leaves the station every twelve hours or so to participate in some sort of obscure motivation ritual. 

This is where Carlos manages to ambush him, only it’s hardly an ambush given just how positively _delighted_ Kevin looks to see him.

“Did you just wake up?” Kevin is burbling. “You know, they can fix that now, don’t you? How much time did you lose? Five, six hours? We should look into the treatment for you I think it would really help—”

Cecil was right. Desert Bluffs is a hell dimension, and Carlos’s punishment for skipping church as a boy is that he now has to make small talk with Kevin as if his life depends on it, because it kind of does.

The device hums, a reminder that he likes Kevin. Of course he likes Kevin. Everybody likes Kevin. Employee cohesion is vital for morale, and morale improves productivity. Which leads to—

“—I’m on my way to a team-building exercise in Prosperity Plaza, do you have any time to spare? Heh, of course, why would you, but—”

He thinks it might be a trap, but the device gives him no indication that it disapproves. “All of the experiments are running smoothly right now,” Carlos says, trying desperately to sound like the caramel-voiced dreamboat that Cecil claims he is. (What does caramel even sound like? Does caramel _have_ a sound? He should run some experiments, and he should _not_ think about Cecil right now.) “But I need to let them sit for a few hours while the computer processes the calculations; I think—that is, if _you_ think that it will, uh—”

“Improve productivity.” 

“Yes. That.” 

The device likes that the experiments are running smoothly. The device likes team-building exercises. _Okay_. This is a win for everyone, then. Carlos and everyone in Carlos’s head are in agreement. Kevin links his arm through his. Maybe it will all be easier than he thinks.

Prosperity Plaza is where, in his mental overlay of Night Vale’s sunny twin, Mission Grove Park should be, except that instead of trees and grass and a dilapidated and hazardous children’s playground that only very rarely devours the children, there are endless plains of clean concrete scattered with spiked benches and No Loitering signs. Bright floodlights cast squares of rich yellow light over the white scrapes left by hundreds of clawing fingernails. Rather than pointing and shouting in terror at the sky, everyone in the park is gathered in a circle around a man with slicked-back hair in a business suit.

The number of places Carlos would rather be right now is near-infinite, and include Dr. Trevelyan’s highly unpleasant Applied Helminthology classes at the University Of What It Is, the Cathedral of Huntokar née Desert Flower Bowling Alley and Arcade Fun Complex (about which he still has nightmares), and his father’s house in Eloy, Arizona. But he takes a deep breath and lets Kevin take over with a loquacious string of apologies for their tardiness, quietly assuming his own place in the circle.

The first half-hour or so is just a recitation of motivational slogans (“Good! Better! Best! Never let it rest! Until your good is better and your better is best!”) and then the man with the slicked-back hair begins passing out blindfolds. 

It’s just like that hoary old trust game, where someone is blindfolded and falls backwards into their partner’s arms, except that, just before the bandana is tied over his eyes, Carlos sees a sharp glint of silver. He is barely able to squeak out a protest before the device in his head jolts him into stunned submission. Blinded—which he ought to be relieved is only temporary, given Kevin—he stumbles and flails for purchase. The concrete is burning beneath his shoes.

“Annnnd, go!” the man with the slicked-back hair announces, and he’s falling, backwards, and for a giddy, weightless instant before the blade snicks into his back, the hands that catch him might have been Cecil’s.

The surprise of being stabbed—not for the first time, granted—takes precedence, if only very briefly, over the pain of being stabbed. Kevin’s arms loop around him, the knife tracing an arc of fire across his ribcage. Kevin presses his nose into Carlos’s neck, pushing the point of the blade against his sternum.

Carlos holds in the breath he was about to take, still against the knife that threatens to gut him. It takes every ounce of willpower he possesses to not cry out, to not at least try to wrestle the weapon out of Kevin’s hands and stab him to death with it. The world is pitch black, lit only by the thin lines of pain that the blade etches into his torso.

“Do you trust me?” Kevin murmurs in his ear, and dear God what was he thinking? Had he, even for a moment, thought that he could somehow get one over on _Kevin_ , of all people?

Choking past the molten agony, Carlos hisses through his teeth. “Yes.” The slightest pressure, the slide of the blade against bone, and the knife will skewer his heart. He trusts that Kevin won’t kill him, or mutilate him past the point where he can stand and work. What else is trust but that?

“You’re so very pretty.” Kevin giggles. His spider-leg fingers trace up the side of Carlos’s neck, catching a strand of his hair and tugging playfully. “Much prettier inside than outside. We’re going to have so much fun together, aren’t we?”

“Yeah,” Carlos gasps. “Absolutely we are.” 

For a minute longer, Kevin holds him in place, and they breathe together, interlocking organs of the same strange body, the blood soaking into Carlos’s lab coat gluing them together. Kevin reaches behind his head and unfastens the blindfold, letting it fall to the ground. “You’re doing great,” he says. “I think you’re going to fit right in here. In fact—” Carlos sways on his feet; he can’t be sure how much blood he’s lost already. “—I think you deserve a reward for being such a swell team player. Your experiments can wait a little longer, right?”

Carlos shrugs, ignoring the sting. He can almost convince himself that he’s survived worse. 

Kevin looks down at his watch. Carlos wonders why; the hands of his watch never move, and it’s not like he even has eyes. 

“Ten minutes,” he declares. “That ought to do it.”

 

* * *

 

“I—don’t really need to,” Carlos says, even though he really _does._  

“I’m not _stupid,_ you know,” Kevin says. “I’m not the one you want. “

And shoves him into the room.

Cecil blinks up at him from the bed, the tips of his tentacles thrashing from under the restraints. “Carlos, dear, sweet Carlos, you’re bleeding.”

So are the walls, oozing crimson, viscous gobs down a rack of medical equipment. Carlos knows he must be a mess, his face caked and crusty from the night (or day, or century) before, fresh blood seeping through the rents in his lab coat every time he moves enough to tear open the scabs. However frightful he must look, though, Cecil looks worse.

Carlos can’t help himself. He laughs. There’s a high, hysterical pitch to his laughter; there’s Cecil, broken in approximately a thousand places, and his only concern is for Carlos’s wounds. _I don’t deserve you,_ a voice in his head declares before he can silence it.

“It’s not important,” Carlos replies, frozen where he stands. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to be doing here. He can’t maintain the wall of separation between everything he was and everything he must do now, not with Cecil right in front of him, scared and vulnerable and watching him from under long, dark lashes. 

“Please come here,” Cecil says, and for all that it’s hoarse and ragged, his voice is still commanding. Irresistible. Carlos manages a few shaky steps forward, until he could, theoretically, touch him. He doesn’t. “What did they do to you? My poor, brave Carlos—they’ll pay for this, they’ll all pay…”

“You shouldn’t—” The words curl and die in his throat. “—talk. I mean. You are not supposed to.” The crawling self-loathing returns; of course Cecil’s going to talk, if he ever stops talking, it’ll be because he’s _dead._

“They took my watch,” Cecil says, as if it’s the gravest assault they could have committed on him, and Carlos looks and sees, yeah, it’s gone. His wrist is mostly covered by the restraint, mottled in welts fading to purple and green, but he can still make out a vaguely watch-shaped strip of skin that’s a lighter brown than the rest. He’d never taken it off, except to shower, not once since Carlos had given it to him.

“You are a research subject,” Carlos says. “You are not allowed personal effects.”

“But it’s the only real clock.” Carlos feels queasy, not sure if it’s from the blood loss or the erosion of his self-induced mental conditioning, and he must have blanched because Cecil notices. Cecil makes another vain attempt to free himself, because for some reason, tied up and gravely injured, he apparently thinks that’s within the realm of possibility if he just tries hard enough. “You _gave_ it to me.”

“It’s just a watch.” For his sins, he gets to see Cecil’s face fall as if Carlos has broken his heart. Again.

He wants to tell Cecil about the plan, about the bomb, that they can not only hear everything he says but everything he _thinks,_ everything he _might_ think, that nothing else, nothing short of an apocalyptic threat to everything they both hold dear would keep him from Cecil’s side. Before he can kill the urge dead, he’s overwhelmed by a tidal wave of affection that spills over his carefully constructed borders, by the sheer desire to just hold him and kiss him and have the world fall away until it’s just the two of them and that’s when the device stops giving him warnings and springs into action mode. He’s wrenched, staggering backwards, smashing into the equipment cart as he falls, skull split open and electric sparks racing each other across the exposed surface of his brain. 

Distantly, through the crushing weight of the pain, he can hear Cecil, first crying out his name, then praying to the Void, a low, monotonous drone in a language he doesn’t recognize. Carlos lies on the floor, sticky with old blood and unidentifiable lumps of meat, wheezing for air until the throbbing ebbs. When he can at last bring himself to stand, he staggers for the door, pausing to give the one-way mirror a hateful glare. 

“Carlos,” Cecil sobs after him. “Stay with me.”

He stops, his hand on the doorknob. Turns slowly. Tries to see Subject 37 objectively, a breathing mass of skin and organs and blood, a thing that has attributes that can be studied, quantified, that does not contain meaning beyond its material properties. Just a body, subject to the mechanics of time and gravity, medium-sized, medium-colored, a little out of shape. Even the noises Cecil makes are just sound waves, vibrations at a particular frequency; to attach value to them, to think of his voice as familiar or comforting or—as it is now—plaintive and desperate—well, that is foolish, and a scientist is never foolish.

“Please be okay,” Cecil whispers.

“What were you praying for?” Carlos asks. This is of anthropological interest, though anthropology is not a proper scientific discipline. “Just now.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Cecil says wearily. “No bloodstones. The gods have no dominion here.”

One does, but neither of them wants to say it. Carlos slips out the door. Cecil’s mirror image, with his vacant eyes and blood-soaked suit, awaits him on the other side.

Carlos puts on his brightest, most winning smile, the one that made Cecil fall in love with him, and straightens his rumpled, tattered lab coat.

“So,” he says to Kevin. “About your show…”

 


	7. Signals

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tamika and Old Woman Josie listen to the radio.

Tamika is sipping tea in Old Woman Josie’s living room when she hears Carlos on the radio.

The tea and the radio show is a tradition that they’ve fallen into in the past few dark weeks. Tamika barely even knew Josie before this—they’re separated by sixty or seventy years and radically different views on violence as a mechanism for social change—but Josie’s angels have apparently informed her of Tamika’s distress, and so Josie invites her over and this way, neither of them needs to listen to Kevin’s show alone. (Tamika doesn’t really believe in angels, but the inherent philosophical questions involved seem a bit abstract now. Besides, she’s beyond grateful for the company.)

Josie serves black tea with lemon and honey. She apologizes for not having baked anything to go with it—her arthritis has been acting up lately—but digs out a dusty box of Girl Guide cookies (Stinging Nettle flavor, which is surprisingly good) that may or may not date back to when Josie herself was a Girl Guide.

 _“—are injected into the mesospermalege and travel via the haemolymph to the seminal conceptacles. Five to seven eggs are laid per week. And that has been your financial news!”_  

_“Sounds like my domestic stock is secure, Kevin. By the way, who’s that with you in the studio?”_

_“Our next guest,”_ Kevin announces with the boundless enthusiasm he seems determined to inflict on the entire Greater Metropolitan Area, _“Well, maybe I should make you guess. Okay! He’s tall, dark, and handsome, and holds several advanced degrees in inorganic chemistry, fringe physics, and quantum mechanics. And gentlemen, I’m told he’s also recently become eligible again? I’m fanning myself! Please join in welcoming to the show—and to our friendly little town—Carlos the Scientist.”_

Tamika’s heart lurches against her ribcage. Josie leans forward to put a wrinkled hand on her wrist, and she clutches the old woman’s fingers in hers.

 _“Thank you, Kevin. I’m so, er,_ thrilled _to be on your show.”_ The words sound forced, as if Carlos is squeezing them through a very thin straw, but it’s definitely him.

_“And to be here in Desert Bluffs.”_

_“Yes, the town has been very…welcoming. And generous. And, uh—”_

“Traitor!” Tamika blurts before she can stop herself, white-hot rage searing her vision.

“Shhh!” Josie claps her hand over the girl’s mouth. “ _Listen._ ”

It’s hard to listen, past the blood pounding in her ears, but Tamika forces deep breaths and tries her very best to focus. When she does, she can hear the tapping between Carlos’s words as he babbles on about StrexCorp’s innovative management strategies and commitment to scientific discovery. The tapping is Morse code, but the message is just a jumble of letters that don’t make any sense. 

Tamika frowns; he clearly learned that trick from Cecil, but at the very least, Cecil might have taught him the code at the same time.

“I don’t understand,” she sighs.

Josie looks at her like she’s stupid. “It’s Unmodified Sumerian.”

“Oh.” Now she _does_ feel stupid. And embarrassed. And contrite. “I, uh, I chose Weird Spanish for my language elective in elementary school,” she admits, then, in a quieter voice, “I wanted to read Jorge Luis Borges in the original.”

“ _I_ speak Unmodified Sumerian,” Josie says. She closes her eyes, taking in the series of dots and dashes, then draws in a quick breath.

“What’s he saying?” Tamika urges, tugging at her arm.

“…in danger,” Josie translates. “Evacuate the town. StrexCorp is coming.” And then she’s clasping Tamika to her, pressing the girl’s face into her bony shoulder, stroking her cornrowed hair. Tamika’s known, she’s suspected for weeks, but somehow the confirmation—coming from Carlos, the outsider, whose words carry the cold certainty of an old mathematics textbook—makes it realer. She is frozen, Josie’s thin, hunched body trembling against hers. 

He’s moved on to something new, some discussion of an exciting new project (“ _Top secret, but we are certain that the whole town, and perhaps others, will come to reap its benefits.”)_ and Tamika gingerly breaks herself free of the old woman’s arms. “I’m sorry, Josie, I need to go. I have to find my book club.”

Josie’s eyes widen. “We should inform the proper authorities,” she said. 

Tamika springs to her feet and runs to the window. Over the sill, she can just see a rustling shape break out of the hedges and flee into the night. “I think we just did.” Her weight falls into the ledge, the forward momentum of her own body more than her shaking legs can bear. “They’ll have to do something now?” The way her voice rises at the end of her sentence transforms it from a question to a child’s plea. She is not a child, though. Not anymore.

“Stay a moment.” She’s rustling through her closet now, surrounded by a heap of abandoned stuffed animals and boxes of photos.

“Josie?” Tamika hates how small she sounds, how utterly helpless. “‘Recently eligible?’ Cecil’s so in love with him, he wouldn’t…” She swallows hard. “Do you think he’s dead?” 

Josie lifts her head. Her face is grey, drawn, a study in lines like an ancient woodcut. 

“I think,” she says slowly, “we’d know if he died. There’s always been a Voice. If they’d killed him, Station Management would hire—” Tamika suspects she means “hire” in the most euphemistic sense possible, “—someone else. And probably not someone StrexCorp would like.” She climbs to her feet, joints cracking, having apparently found what she was looking for in the closet. Belatedly, Tamika thinks that she should have helped her up. Josie looks too old, too frail, to withstand what is coming.

Josie, to her credit, doesn’t tell her she’s too young to fight or to leave it in the hands of the Sheriff’s Secret Police. She’s lived in Night Vale long enough to know better. She presses a velvet bag, a deep, rich crimson caked in decades of dust, into Tamika’s hand. 

“My late husband’s bloodstones,” Josie says. “I could never bear to use them, but maybe he’ll watch over you.”

For once in her young life, Tamika finds herself lost for words. She doesn’t want to contemplate what this gift has cost Josie. In her other hand, the old woman has an ancient portable radio with a creaky handle and plastic wood casing. Tamika puts the items in the Dora the Impaler knapsack that her mother bought her when she was eight. It’s a little too childish for her current tastes, but her other one died a valiant martyr’s death in the Night Vale Public Library.

“So that you can keep listening,” Josie explains.

“I won’t be able to understand.”

“Even still. Go find your friends,” Josie says, softly, then, “I wish I could go with you.”

Tamika is already picturing the oncoming waves of StrexSoldiers, an endless parade of Plexiglass and orange triangles. She doesn’t have confidence that any of the town’s authorities will be able to hold them back. “I wish I could protect you,” Tamika says.

Josie laughs. “I have my angels for that, dear.”

Tamika frowns. Impulsively, she hugs Josie again.

“Be strong,” Josie says, where another adult might have said, “Be safe.”

“I always am,” Tamika replies, and if there’s any regret in her voice, you’d never know it.


	8. Faith

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carlos does SCIENCE and debates theology. Josie and the Sheriff share a moment, and a secret.

“Pass the actinometer?” Carlos calls down. He’s perched precariously on top of a weapon that, if Aviva’s calculations are off by nanometers in one direction, could potentially reformat the molecular structure of everyone in the laboratory, and if the calculations are off in another direction, collapse its own shining heart in on itself, creating a small black hole. Both results, Carlos decides, are sub-optimal. Fortunately, the thing’s still switched off.

Stewart, one of the lab assistants, reaches up to hand him the instrument. Like all of the equipment, it’s more modern and precisely calibrated than anything he’d had in Night Vale. The readings from inside the Subtle Bomb’s glowing core are well within an acceptable range, though the needle jitters when an unprompted forbidden thought— _a radioactive surge could trigger a cascade effect and cook the internal mechanism_ —crosses his mind.

“Interesting,” he mumbles. He’s asked Aviva about the source of the energy that powers the device, but she says that Nigel, Carlos’s predecessor, had been in charge of sourcing and installing the material, and had done so under the highest level of security during a rare company-sanctioned midnight. Beyond the upper levels of StrexCorp management, only the head of R&D knew how they’d somehow harvested a living part (Stem cell? Blood sample? What, exactly, is in there, and more important, _how awake is it_?) of the Smiling God and turned it into an almost-functioning weapon.

 _And now he’s dead,_ Carlos thinks with a certain measure of satisfaction. The needle stutters again.

“What’s interesting?” Aviva looks up from her computer as he slides off the top of the weapon. His wounds ache at the movement, but too he’s distracted by the machine’s bizarre reaction to his thoughts to pay them much attention.

“Preliminary observations—” he says, and okay, it’s a little _cool_ and he’s a little excited. Maybe more than a little. Definitely more than he should be. “—suggest some sort of psychic interface.” He hates the word “psychic”; it reeks of mysticism and superstition. Half the supposed “psychic phenomena” reported in Night Vale turned out to be listening devices installed by the Sheriff’s Secret Police. Probably more than half, if he were better at finding the bugs.

But the Subtle Bomb noticed him. If a smooth, fist-sized river rock can run a community college, he thinks, perhaps a weapon can be alive, express desire, even fear. It would hardly be the strangest thing he’s encountered.

“Of course,” Aviva says.

“You _knew?_ ”

“That it’s sentient?” She’s staring at him like she pities him for his stupidity. “Naturally. It’s divine _.”_

Carlos, with a start, is reminded of where he is and what he’s supposed to be doing. “But you’re a _scientist_ ,” he says, nonplussed.

“The divinity of the Smiling God is empirically provable,” Aviva says without a trace of doubt or irony. “It stands to reason that a sample of the Smiling God is also divine and infinitely powerful.” She sways over to him and puts a hand on his back. “Infinitely merciful, too,” she says, gently. “One day, you will come to know His mercy.”

“I’ll pass,” Carlos says. “Thanks though.”

“The weapon is perfect.” Aviva muses, trailing her hand over the gunmetal casing. Carlos isn’t sure if it’s his imagination, but it seems to thrum at her touch, the sheen rippling where her fingers brush against it. He would not go so far as to say that it likes her; that would be taking anthropomorphism too far. But he saw a reaction. “It is the culmination of centuries of research and prophecy. It channels the sacred energy of the cosmos. Why, then—” and now she’s staring at him, like he’s become transparent, like she _knows,_ “—does it fail?” 

“Possibly because no one can even get close enough to run a simple diagnostics check.”

“Except you.”

“Except me.”

The sadness in her face is palpable. “I was like you, once. A non-believer.”

He rolls his eyes before he can stop himself, and tells the device in his head where it can stick its protest. He can serve StrexCorp perfectly adequately without buying into their nonsense.

“Irrigation was my thing,” she continues, brightening at the very thought. “Water reserve systems maximized for efficiency in this climate. I wanted to bring life to the desert, sustainably.” 

“What happened?”

She shrugs. “Same old story. Lost funding, the project hit a standstill.”

“And in rode StrexCorp, on a white horse, to save the day. Provided you sign on to their next project.” She affirms it with a jackpot noise and a pointed finger. “And now you are become Death, Destroyer of Worlds.”

She stares at him with wide eyes. “I’m here to save the world,” she says, “not to destroy it. I’d like to save you too, if you’d let me. I really don’t want to lose another colleague.”

“I’m afraid I’m well past salvation,” Carlos tells her.

“I don’t believe that. I don’t believe it of anyone. Oh, Carlos, there’s so very much we can do with the right attitude and with science on our side.”

He glances up at the weapon, silent and grim above them. _And how do you feel about that?_ He wonders if it knows what he’s doing. He wonders if maybe, at some level, it doesn’t _want_ to be a vessel of destruction.

“Enough talking,” Aviva says, returning to her console. “We won’t make our quotas for the day at this rate.”

Carlos swallows hard, and without another word, returns to his work.

 

* * *

 

 

At the back of the car lot, a chorus of alarms wail, each one louder than the next. Old woman Josie settles into her chair on the porch, adjusting the focus of her binoculars. 

It’s good that the car alarms are there. They usually keep her up at night, but at her age, she doesn’t need much sleep. For now, it conceals conversation, and that’s something that’s always valuable.

“All clear,” she announces as she puts them on the side table. “You can take that off now. It must be stuffy.”

The man standing on the edge of the porch slides his balaclava up to his hairline, then removes the mouthpiece of his vocoder. He shifts the folds of his black cloak around himself as he sits in the chair beside her.

“It _is_ stuffy,” he agrees. Without the synthesizer, she can hear the remnants of a Midwestern drawl in his voice.

“Your secret’s safe with me,” Josie says dryly. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” Not that she doesn’t already know.

“Evacuate the town?” 

“That’s what the young man said.”

“We’ve fought them back once.”

“I don’t know Carlos well,” Josie says, “but he strikes me as a precise thinker. I think if he’d meant, ‘fight,’ he’d have said ‘fight.’ He said ‘run.’”

“He’s still an outsider,” he says. “An interloper, even.”

Josie smiles. “In case you’ve forgotten,” she tells him. “So are we.”

It’s true; Josie forgets it too, sometimes. She’s lived here longer than most of the natives have been alive, and there’s such a diversity of accents (in the case of Hiram, occasionally several that belong to a single person) that her own Louisiana twang goes unnoticed and unremarked upon.

“We keep secrets for a reason,” he says, and it’s strange for her to speak to him like this, stripped of his voice and pretences. “Even if we could get someone into the station without Cecil there, even if we could hold back Station Management for long enough to make the equipment work and make everyone _listen—_ Josie, you know what it would mean. Carlos is behind enemy lines. If we take any action at all, they’ll figure out pretty damn quickly who tipped them off.” 

She nods. The words “recently eligible” flit through her mind. Poor Cecil, she thinks; wherever he is now, things probably aren’t going very well for him.

“He must know that,” Josie replies. “And it was obviously a risk he was willing to take.”

He takes this information in. His breathing rasps; it would sound impressive through the vocoder; absent it, it sounds to her like the beginnings of emphysema. Neither of them is as young as they used to be.

“But sacrifices must,” he says, “be made. In fact, sacrifices must be made frequently, and with conviction. We can only assume that the scientist is willing to give his life for Night Vale.”

 _He wouldn’t_ , Josie thinks, _if he had any comprehension of what it would do to Cecil._ He can’t, of course; he’s known Cecil for a few years. Josie’s known him his whole life.

“If it were only that,” Josie says. “But it isn’t.”

“No,” he echoes. “It isn’t. You and I, we can slip back into the world, even if ‘Sheriff of Night Vale’ isn’t something that’s easy to explain on a résumé. But Hiram? The Faceless Old Woman? Sarah Sultan? Megan Wallaby? Cecil, if he’s even still—”

“I know,” she says. “You think I don’t know?” She sighs. “Promise me…?”

His hand inches towards hers, but never reaches it. It’s the Zeno’s Paradox of comforting gestures. “What?”

“If—when—the time comes, you’ll let the ones who can be saved decide for themselves.”

“The other way might be kinder.”

“Promise me anyway.”

He swallows, clenches his jaw. It goes against everything he’s become, since moving to Night Vale, against the inscrutable order with which he’s kept the peace in their friendly little town. But appearances to the contrary, he is not an unreasonable man. 

“Yes, ma’am,” he says.

“We both protect Night Vale, Sheriff, in our own way.”

“That we do, ma’am,” he says, though he has never admitted to seeing her angels, though he’ll never believe that she, unsleeping, keeps watch over her adopted home. Still, she thinks, he believes her. “That we do.”


	9. Mere Anarchy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Lauren and Cecil have words. Tamika rallies her troops.

Lauren should be working. She turns to the wall and spreads herself against it, pledges herself to its great warmth, and promises it that she is, in fact, _busting her butt,_ cheerfully, and diligently, for its benefit. She is the Vice-President, after all, her very existence is, by certain definitions, work. 

She is working now. She is trying to understand.

Cecil watches her, because that’s all he _can_ do, and of the two of them, she is less free. 

“You have a problem,” he observes.

Lauren has many problems, but she’s not about to confess any of them to the creature before her. The Board of Directors is up her ass about the fiscal year-end figures and the Subtle Bomb, which, from their perspective, is a yawning black hole into which investment capital is sucked, never to emerge. Night Vale isn’t worth it, financially speaking, and they are beginning—she thinks—to suspect that it’s personal for her, some kind of vendetta.

That’s not even the worst of it. 

She circles the gurney, wary. Even clamped to the bed with restraints, she’s aware of how very dangerous he is. It’s easy enough to underestimate him, with his cheerful manners and the fact that his Tumblr is 75% cat pictures, 25% appallingly written shark erotica (which she may have spent _slightly_ more time reading it than she should have while on work time), but the jovial façade has a monster lurking beneath it. She saw what was left of poor Nigel after his team found him.

His third eye is open and unblinking. It’s paranoia to assume that he can see something in her that no one else can. She wants to pretend that he can’t see anything. It looks blind, after all, milky white flecked with violet and indigo, a sea of constellations in reverse, full of cosmic radio static.

But she knows better.

“What are you looking at?” she asks, forcing a pleasant smile.

His own smile is just as false, though much more chilling. “At my beautiful town,” he says. “Which is still standing, despite your best efforts. You are not your perfect self, Lauren. And _he_ is very angry with you.” 

She bends closer. Her lips stretch and tighten. Now they’re in a nuclear arms race of pretend-conviviality. “And he’s told you this.”

“Oh, yes. These walls are suffused with his presence, Lauren, or can’t you feel it?” 

The truth is that she can’t. She never has. She prays, and is faithful, and serves the Smiling God as no human being on earth has ever done, and yet she remains cold, alone, adrift. It is worse than sacrilege that _he_ would speak to Cecil, professional blasphemer and subversive influence that he is, leaving Lauren—who has been nothing but devoted since the day StrexCorp moved into her town—stranded in the theological wilderness.

“There is a box,” Cecil continues. His voice— _Voice,_ she thinks, it’s whatever otherworldly force that keeps his dead heart beating speaking to her now. “You are trying to open it. You think Carlos can open it for you. Maybe he will; I don’t know what you’ve done to him, what you’ve made him. You think that what emerges will make you happier, more fulfilled, more perfect. Don’t you know what happens to people who open forbidden boxes?” 

“We pride ourselves in risk-taking here,” Lauren replies haughtily. “We don’t cower, terrified, in the darkness of ignorance and backward traditions.”

Cecil says, “Maybe you should.”

Cold skitters up the flesh of her arms. What _is_ he? “All you have is words.”

“That’s all I need. Words, and time. Even now, Lauren, you approach your own inevitable decay and putrefaction. With every second that passes, you are closer to dirt filling your mouth, to all things crumbling to entropy. You are so very small. And you do not have his love.” 

Before she can stop herself, she strikes, a stinging blow across his face. He can’t so much as recoil without angering the restraints; he flinches, but it only makes her feel more impotent.

“Maybe not,” Lauren says. “But I have this.”

And she pulls out her phone, hits the first number in her favorites. She was going to wait, but it’s better to do it now, in front of him.

“It’s time to deploy,” she says. “Move into Night Vale. It’s yours for the taking.”

 

* * *

  

The diminished ranks of Tamika Flynn’s book club meets in the scrublands, gathered around a bonfire. Tamika herself has graduated from Sun Tzu to Machiavelli, and she begins the meeting with a triumphant: “Whoever conquers a free town and does not demolish it commits a great error and may expect to be ruined himself.” She ends the sentence with a flourish. 

It’s basically downhill from there. 

There are only seven of them left: Over the summer, Livia and Tomas have become, as Suthan puts it, “A Thing,” as have Nadia and Zoe, and now budding teenage romance has left them no time for either literature or armed insurrection. (At least, Tamika assumes that by “A Thing” he means they’ve started dating. There is, in Night Vale, always the possibility that they have all merged to become one monstrous entity of conjoined flesh and teenage hormones, but Tamika decides against asking for clarification.) Luis’s mother has pulled him out of school for his senior year and moved the whole family to Modesto. Several other children have fallen prey to the annual cull, or have met with misadventure in the Whispering Forest.

“This time,” she continues, determined, “we’ll take the fight to them. They will live to regret the day they wrote our town in their regional expansion plan. We will _bury_ them.” 

Ahmed looks uncomfortable and dips the peak of his baseball bat lower over his face. “Uhhh,” he says.

“Tamika…” Yasi says, managing to squeeze a world of sadness, sympathy, and vague unsettlement into three syllables. “It’s just that—” She looks to the others for support, but no one wants to say out loud exactly how doomed to fail her effort is.

“If we don’t do something soon,” Tamika says, “they will be right back here again, with their hordes of eyeless automatons and their electrified volleyball nets, ready to carve up anyone who doesn’t tow the line. At least until then we have the element of surprise.”

“They’re gonna kill us,” Deanna says. “You know that, right?”

“I’m saying you get to choose how you die.”

But there’s a difference between a brave, innocent 12-year-old rallying her highly literate guerilla army against helicopters everyone can see, and a 14-year-old serial recalcitrant insisting that they uproot lives that have grown from sprouts to saplings. As sacrifices to feral librarians, they had little to lose; now they have crushes and GPAs to maintain.

“We’re freshmen,” Beth is saying. “Things are totally different. We can’t just go running off to fight a war because you think there might be one.” 

“Yeah,” Kylee adds, “and it’s not even like StrexCorp is going to change things all that much. If you think about it, we’re pretty much living in a totalitarian surveillance state _now_. What’s it matter if it gets overrun by a corporate dystopia?”

She opens her mouth to explain the vast socio-political differences between a hybrid state socialist mostly-benevolent dictatorship and a theocratic, neo-feudal kleptocracy, then thinks better of it. If Cecil were here, Tamika thinks, he’d have something inspiring to say about how it’s _their_ totalitarian surveillance state, _their_ brief and bewildered lives to be crushed beneath one boot-heel or another. Instead, she says, “They are going to take away everything that’s beautiful, and strange, and magical about our city, and they’re going to crush it under long-term sales projections, and they are going to turn us all into mindless office drones.”

“Sweetie,” Beth says, because now that she’s a month away from her 15th birthday, she’s started calling anyone younger than herself that. “Isn’t that what growing up basically is?”

Maybe, Tamika thinks, that’s always been her problem. Other kids want to be doctors or astronauts or cytoplasm injection technicians when they grow up. She’s never been able to picture herself living that long. She resents them, a little, for their faith that they will.

“You’re basically Don Quixote,” Suthan says. “I mean, all we have to go on is the scientist saying that we’re all in terrible danger, and he’s not even _from_ here. You’re just traumatized, Tamika. Like, with PTSD. You need _therapy_ , not an army.”

“Yeah?” Tamika shoots back. “Well, you’re—you’re Susan Pevensie, minus the really problematic gender politics of those novels. You’ve turned your back on Narnia, and your friends. You think just because you’re older now, you’re _safe?_ You think the fight ain’t gonna find you?” She glares around the fire at each of them. “Old Woman Josie is like 200 years old, and she’s more of a badass than you guys. I’m gonna take down StrexCorp. Or, I guess, I’m gonna die trying. Probably the latter. Alone, if I have to. But I’m not just going to wait and let them do what they want to me. If that’s growing up, I’d rather die young and awesome.”

She stands up. There’s a moment where she thinks she really is going to die alone, and then Deanna stands too. “Okay,” she says. “I’m in.” 

Ahmed nods. “Me too.”

“Sorry, Tamika,” Beth says. “I just can’t.” Suthan looks away and won’t even meet her eyes.

In the end, Yasi and Kylee at least agree to think about it. Tamika bites her lip and doesn’t cry. Five is better than nothing. She didn’t even have five friends before the Summer Reading Program. At least she’s not completely alone anymore.

“Where do we go now?” Yasi asks. “How do we even _get_ to Desert Bluffs? No one here’s got a driver’s license.”

Tamika takes a deep breath. “I have an idea,” she says. “I think it’s really dangerous and stupid, but it’ll work. Go get your slingshots and a few literary classics, and meet me at the Dog Park.”


	10. Kaboom

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carlos goes too far. Dana tries to quell civic unrest.

Carlos can feel the Subtle Bomb’s whispering inside his head, adding its voice to the existing chorus that apparently gets to live there now. It tests the boundaries of its reality, of the vast apparatus it inhabits in the laboratory, and the wider psychic prison that confines it. It is curious. It examines its world, and from this, draws conclusions. It urges Carlos to give it life, to bring it into the world.

Carlos, consciously, wants to do exactly as it wishes. The science alone is fascinating. He will create technology unlike anything the world has ever seen, something that doesn’t kill, per se, but transfigures, suffuses with light and faith, remakes the darkness into luminescence. No one else can do this. He’s never worked for fame or Nobel Prizes—though, if his career had gone differently, but it didn’t—but his perfection of StrexCorp’s invention will be an even greater reward.

Like the water Aviva wished to bring to the barren desert, Carlos will bring happiness. 

Better than happiness. The Bomb knows him, maybe better than he knows himself, loves him. Wants to offer him what it can offer the world. _Set me free,_ it promises, _and I will make you belong._

Carlos, unconsciously, works even harder, Doug’s training guiding his hands. A wire there, a measurement off by microns, and— 

— _BAM—_  

The relic of the Smiling God shrieks, betrayed, and the resulting shockwave sends him skidding into the opposite wall. Aviva runs for the fire extinguisher. Smoke peels lazily from the bomb’s casing, followed by a cascade of tiny ear mites, and the metal sweats out a viscous fluid, sweet and piercing, like tree sap. 

One day, maybe two of lost productivity. The device in his skull complains, the Subtle Bomb is still wailing, but Carlos allows himself the luxury of a tiny, relieved smile.

Aviva clears her throat. He looks up.

“What the _fuck,_ Carlos?” she says—a second before smashing the fire extinguisher down on his head.

 

* * *

 

Identify the weaknesses in the host organism’s immune system. Wait for an opening, then move in. 

This is how a virus spreads. 

There is a riot in the Barista District. Plumes of smoke billow from the caves as clusters of nattily dressed, tattooed youths flood into the streets, wielding artisanal Molotov cocktails fashioned from hand-blown glass, oak-aged whisky, and fair-trade, shade-cultivated petrol sourced from the finest local free-range dinosaur bones. They spill into the parking lot of Ace’s Hardware on fixed-gear bicycles, undeterred by several of the Sheriff’s Secret Police outfitted with leather shields and elaborate, scarab-shaped metal helmets over their balaclavas. 

Seated on her mayoral throne, Dana Cardinal buries her face in her hands. The Sheriff’s genderless spokesbeing clears their throat.

“I can’t do anything,” Dana says, which isn’t, strictly speaking, true. City Council has the power to call in the vague, yet menacing, government agency and have the agitators quietly removed to Skeleton Gorge. She could ask City Council to give the order. The vague, yet menacing, government agency could carry out the order, if they’re not busy doing more important things. 

But Dana tries very hard to be a good mayor. She knows that she’s young and that her only experience in civic leadership is surviving an internship at NVCR and summoning an army of masked warriors to fight StrexCorp, but she recognizes the position for the strange, life-threatening honor and responsibility that it is. She’d rather, if people had to die on her watch, that it be no more than the usual amount of people who die in the course of the town’s regular activities. 

“It will spread,” the spokesbeing says. “Burn it out now—”

“I want to go there.”

“It isn’t safe.”

Dana rolls her eyes. “Night Vale mayors don’t exactly have a long life expectancy.”

Accordingly, she’s escorted to the Barista District in a limo, with a blue helicopter overhead and a convoy of the Sheriff’s Secret Police’s armored cars on either side of her own. They won’t let her get near the heart of the district; she can just barely see the rugged rock face against a deep green sky, lit in flashes of orange and yellow as a screaming man in a flat cap, lenseless glasses, and ironic mustache hurls a fiery mason jar at the line of police. Three girls with sleeve tattoos take a selfie as the improvised explosive bursts across the sand beside them.

“Do you think you can capture one?” she asks the spokesbeing, who shrugs. Several of their compatriots storm into the fray. Some of the Secret Police are barking orders into megaphones, but their voices are lost in the din.

Four Secret Police officers are dragging a struggling man between them. They set him in front of Dana like a blood offering.

“What do you want?” the barista spits. 

“I was going to ask you the same question,” Dana says evenly. She waves her hand. “All of this. For what reason? Didn’t I start a job creation program? With _health benefits_?” 

He snorts. “Yeah. We got a new coffee shop all right.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. 

“Coffee Collective.” She remembers the place now, a warm little café with furniture carved from reclaimed wood and single-origin slow-roasted beans. It played a sole Mumford & Sons CD on repeat, but otherwise it hadn’t been bad, actually, and it kept rotating shifts of baristas off the streets. “What’s the problem, then?”

He sighs, as if he’s had to explain this thousands of times to an audience as simple-minded as Dana herself. “Come on.”

The barista grabs her hand and tugs her forward, towards the surging crowd. “Get _back!_ ” one of the officers shouts, but she shakes her head.

“I need to know.” Before they can stop her, she’s running towards the district, searing heat rising from the sands. The coffee shop itself is in flames, but its vintage painted tin sign is flameproof, bearing the logo of a stylized tikbalang.

Aghast, Dana says, “That was a key plank of the new administration’s municipal economic development initiative! We’re trying to attract investment.” 

“It’s a subsidiary,” the barista snits. “Don’t you know who owns them?”

Dana shivers, though the heat wave that has rocked the desert for weeks hasn’t abated.

“StrexCorp?” 

“Worse. Nestlé.*” He pauses, then adds, “Which is owned by StrexCorp. Not to mention that it was pretty hard to schedule shift work when Thursday kept getting cancelled.” 

She sees, now that she looks closer, the coffee cup held in the tikbalang’s elongated hands. Almost unnoticeable amid the waves of smoke rising from the cup is a small orange triangle.

They’re not invading. They’re already here. Perhaps they never even left.

“We need to get the radio station back.” Dana groans, then has a flash of panic. Since her return from the desert, time hasn’t always worked properly. Have they even lost the station yet? For all she knows, Cecil could still be alive. She checks her left arm—still there, so maybe it’s before the town has fallen. 

 _No wonder all mayors go insane,_ she thinks, _if more of this is what I have to look forward to._

“I need to go. I need—”

She topples over into a dead faint.

 

* * *

 

* Nestlé products are banned within Night Vale city limits. [Ask me why](http://www.babymilkaction.org/nestlefree%20).


	11. A Game of Secrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carlos is having a bad day. Cecil is quite possibly having a worse one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is possibly one of those chapters where I haven't listed enough warnings in the tags. "Temporary character death" and "references to religious mourning rituals," I suppose. Also a general, "urk, sorry about this."

His skull aches. His nerves continue to function, transmitting pain stimuli to the brain’s cortex. From this, he concludes that he isn’t yet dead. Slowly, against the wishes of said likely severely damaged organ, he opens his eyes.

He immediately wishes that he didn’t. 

He is not—he realizes as he tests the movement of his wrists and ankles—even restrained. He is a respected scientist. No, he is more than that. He is a valued and trusted member of the team.

“We just want to know why, Carlos.”

Lauren’s manner is pleasant, businesslike, as always, even though there seems to be between two and four of her, depending on how he tilts his head. There’s a note of disappointment in her tone that’s sharper than anger would have been. Aviva, or, more accurately, several Avivas, sulk in the corner, soldering together some of the wires blown up in Carlos’s sabotage attempt.

Kevin—oh Jesus have mercy, Kevin—is standing just a few feet away behind a half-upright gurney with a scalpel to Cecil’s throat. Cecil is completely still—not that he has much choice—his breath coming in small, measured puffs. A deeper breath, and the blade would break skin.

“I don’t know,” Carlos whispers, and for a certain value of truth, he isn’t even lying. 

“We want to understand,” Lauren adds, as if she’s doing him a favor by facilitating his confession. “We aren’t going to hurt you.”

“You can’t kill Ce—Subject 37, either,” Carlos says quickly. It’s hard to form words past the throbbing in his head. It’s hard to do anything. The pain is bad enough that the knife wounds across his torso barely register as an afterthought. “You have every logical motive to kill him, and you’ve expressed a strong desire to do so in the past, but you haven’t yet, which means that you can’t.” 

“That’s true too.” Kevin keeps the blade stock still, but somehow manages to clap Cecil on the shoulder. “Right, buddy? Because you’re already—”

“ _Kevin!_ ” Lauren recovers immediately from her outburst, and turns her attention to Carlos. “We would never kill _anyone,_ ” she tells him. “Particularly not a future employee. We intend to return him to his home, and his work. Eventually.”

“Let him go,” Carlos says. Neither the device, nor Doug’s careful instruction, particularly likes him begging for Cecil’s life. _I am a scientist,_ he tells himself. _This is a unique biological entity. It cannot be destroyed, not before it is studied. Doing so is a crime against human knowledge._

“Of course,” Lauren assures him. “Just as soon as you tell us how you managed to slip destruction of this magnitude past a psychic tracking device with real-time streaming capabilities.” 

Carlos looks past her, at Cecil. He doubts there was ever a time in their relationship when something as simple as eye contact would have communicated the vast complexities he’s trying to convey. And even if there was, it’s long past, buried beneath all the things he wasn’t brave enough to say back in the desert, the lengths he’s had to go to and the depths he has yet to fall. 

“I am sorry,” Carlos says. “I really have no idea.” 

“Hey Kev,” Lauren chirps.

Kevin grimaces, but they’ve been doing this a long time. He manages a sweet, “Yes, Lauren?”

“How many limbs do you think it takes to host a radio show? Minimum estimate.”

This appears to please Kevin enough to make him forget about the nonconsensual diminutive of his name. “Not as many as he has.” He carefully places the scalpel on a tray beside the gurney, alongside several instruments that look even worse. 

“Hmm. Redundancies. Well, that can be fixed.” 

Carlos is on his feet before he can stop himself, desperation outweighing self-preservation, but Lauren is faster, pinning him to the wall with more strength than her tasteful power-suited demeanor would suggest she possessed. Past the point of her shoulder, Kevin has the end of one of Cecil’s tentacles caught between his jagged teeth. Slowly, his attention fixed on Carlos, he grinds his jaw closed. There’s a squishing sound, like a dog tearing at raw meat.

Carlos yelps before Cecil does, as though he were the one being tortured. Cecil is well acquainted with pain, as would be expected of any former Boy Scout and current NVCR employee, and it’s long seconds before the scream finally tears itself free from his throat. Kevin swallows audibly and licks blue-black ichor from his lips. The maimed tentacle whips loosely, smearing darkness across the white sheet and the red floor. 

“We have a contract,” Carlos grits out. “If you have a problem with the quality of my work, you can take it up with me. Not with my…research subject.” He wishes he couldn’t see the look of betrayal in Cecil’s eyes, like the label hurts him worse than the steady pump of ichor from the ragged stump. He moans, quietly, like he doesn’t want to cause the rest of them any inconvenience.

Off come the velvet gloves. Still pressed up against him—he can smell her perfumed neck—Lauren says, “We’ll start with the tentacles. Then toes. Fingers. I don’t think he needs all three eyes—Kevin, how many eyes do _you_ need?”

 _Stop it,_ Carlos wants to say, but he’s prepared—much as he doesn’t want to be—against this eventuality, and a mental failsafe, a steel trap, closes around his subconscious, layers of ancient code, a science that pre-dates human civilization, transcribed in the long-dead language once spoken by Doug’s people, near-impenetrable. He bites his tongue. Distantly, he can hear Cecil mumbling, half-delirious from the pain, and wonders if he’s begging for Carlos to hold out or to just tell them.

 _It doesn’t matter,_ he thinks. _None of this is scientifically significant. None of it needs to concern me._ He tells himself he’s back in the desert, days and night blurring together before an endless flame. He is removed from the world. From Cecil. All that matters is the work.

“Carlos,” Lauren chides, snapping her fingers. “Pay attention.” 

Kevin reaches around into the shadows, and retrieves a squirming grub the size of his fist. He holds it to the light, and it shrieks and squirms in his hands. Its exoskeleton looks rigid, with several bony spines, trailing off into an articulated tail. Inside its toothy mouth is another toothier mouth like a miniature sarlacc. It doesn’t look like something that would originate in Desert Bluffs; what’s left of his sense of curiosity stirs, wondering where they got it. 

“This is Bob,” Kevin says with every ounce of his usual cheer. 

Cecil has the presence of mind to mutter, “Of course it is.”

“I’m going to slice you open and put him inside you,” Kevin purrs, “and let him chew his way out. But only when you ask me to, okay?”

“I’m not going to ask you to,” Cecil says.

“We’re going to play a game,” Kevin says in a stage whisper, giggling like a kid on a sleepover with a flashlight under his face. “You like games, right?”

“You have _Risk_ here?” Cecil’s dented remnants of bravado barely hold against the slowing drip of his own blood. It’s down to his own—unfortunate, in this case—resilience that he’s even still conscious.

“It’s a game of secrets. We’re going to play until you ask me to put Bob into you. Won’t that be fun? You’re going to tell me—and Lauren, and Aviva, and lovely Carlos, of course—all about what happened to you when you were fifteen. Do you remember, Cecil?”

“No.”

“I do. I listened to the tapes. We all did, right? Carlos?”

Carlos nods, feeling ill. He would never have made it as far as he did in life if he were a squeamish person, but nor is he as stoic as he’d like to be, and the headache, the double vision, the fact that he got clocked on the head with a fire extinguisher, all lead him to conclude that he has a concussion. For the first time since he arrived in Desert Bluffs, he wonders if he actually will live through this.

“And you remember, Cecil. You do. Your mother, covering every mirror in the house.”

“Out of respect,” Cecil says, dully, as if repeating something he’d been told. 

“Out of _mourning_ ,” Kevin clarifies. “And your brother, hollow-eyed and howling from grief. Your mother barely remembered the rituals, but she knew what to do. I mean, she was also a paranoid schizophrenic with an inconsistent relationship to linear chronology, but she knew to cover the mirrors. How they must have wept for you, Cecil. You were so very young, so promising…”

“She hid,” Cecil says, though he doesn’t sound convinced. “It was a game.” 

“ _Yit'gadal v'yit'kadash sh'mei raba—”_

“Stop.” 

“— _b'al'ma di v'ra khir'utei…*”_

“ _Stop._ ” Cecil’s voice cracks, practically squeaks, like it had on the tapes that Carlos had pushed to the back of his mind. Carlos struggles against Lauren’s grip. He has only a vague idea of what Kevin is suggesting or how he even knows details that Cecil can’t or won’t remember, but Cecil thrashes violently in the restraints, distressed as much at Kevin’s words than by the physical pain. So it must be true. He knows Cecil isn’t dead—the biological markers of life are all present in him, right down to the pulse of the ichor as it clots—but it doesn’t mean that the boy whose voice was on those cassettes survived in any meaningful sense of the term.

“Tell me,” Kevin murmurs. “What do you think was worse for her? Losing you, or what she got back?”

Cecil makes a strangled noise. Kevin strokes the side of his face, fumbling for something on the tray with his free hand. 

“Shh, shhh. Poor thing. Are you ready for Bob yet, or shall we show Carlos why your mother ran?” 

Cecil summons a last vestige of strength and hisses, “Don’t you dare.” 

Kevin tsks. “Oh, _you_! Now _I_ wanna see.”

“He won’t—you need his mind intact!”

It’s too late. Carlos sees what he’s been reaching for, catches the glint of light on metal and a second, just a split second out of the corner of his eye, sees Cecil’s reflection.

He doubles over and vomits on Lauren’s shoes. He hasn’t eaten much today and it’s mostly water and bile; his hands slide into drying viscera and bump against the gurney’s wheels. He’s aware of the room spinning, the earth’s rotational velocity of 855 mph, the thin cheesecloth layer of atmosphere between existence and destruction and the vast, unfathomable consciousness that lies beyond. He feels the boundaries of his perception stretch and contract, unbearably so. He kneels and he wretches and he weeps, and when Lauren yanks him to his feet, the mirror’s face down on the tray and Cecil is begging, sobbing, for Bob. 

“Let me hear you say ‘please,’” Kevin says with the vigor of a child pulling the wings off flies.

“Lucid dreaming.” Carlos chokes out, his solidly constructed mental walls crumbled to dust beneath the assault. “When I sleep, I code counter maneuvers into my muscle memory. It is entirely an involuntary reflex, not a conscious thought, which is why your device can’t detect anything.” He staggers and would fall but Lauren keeps him upright. He buries his face against her shoulder, but the darkness is worse, afterimages of the vision—of what Cecil is—spattered across the inside of his eyelids. Carlos is horribly, helplessly small. The universe will devour him, if Cecil doesn’t unmake him first.

“Why?” 

He straightens his spine as best he can. He tells himself that even if the world is spinning out of control, it always has been, and he can still ground himself in the things to which he’s always clung. “You are not,” he says, mind-control devices be-damned. “Going to tamper with the most scientifically interesting community in the U.S. Not before my experiments are concluded.” He expects the thing to go off again, to even kill him, but maybe Aviva damaged it somehow when she smashed him over the head, because beyond the ever-present tinnitus buzzing, this thought and these words have no effect. Maybe it wants to know. Emboldened, he goes farther. He’s going to die anyway. “I have been training for months,” he spits, “segmenting my brain so that I could appear devoted to the project and work against you simultaneously. And it’s worked. Even if you kill me, you can’t complete the Subtle Bomb without me. I’m sure you can eventually find a scientist of my caliber from outside the Smiling God’s reach to come work for you, but by then it’ll be too late.”

“Too late?” Lauren turns as Kevin coughs softly into his sleeve. “Of course; I see now. Kevin’s show. You passed on a message to Night Vale.”

Exhausted, Carlos slumps back down to the floor. It’s over. It’s a Pyrrhic victory, but he’s won. It doesn’t matter if they drag him off and shoot him, or feed him to Kevin, or use him to paint the laboratory a fresher shade of red. If he hasn’t saved Night Vale forever, at least he’s protected it for now. At least Cecil—if there’s anything of Cecil left at the end of all of this—will know why Carlos abandoned him. 

Just as easily, his moment of triumph is snatched away. There’s barely a breath before Lauren and Kevin are all smiles again, like proud parents, and Aviva is kneeling beside him, hugging him. “You think we hate you,” she murmurs in his ear. “Carlos, you’re our friend. We _forgive_ you. Thank you _so much_ for telling us this.”

“It’s just a minor setback,” Lauren agrees. “A conflict between the imperfect present and the future perfect.”

“Sweet Carlos,” he hears Kevin say, right before he’s dragged off by two StrexCorps guards, straining, between them, to catch one last glimpse of Cecil. “Don’t you worry.” When Carlos looks up, just before he passes out, it isn’t Cecil he sees—neither the face he shows the world nor the amaranthine horror that he never could—but Kevin, lips stretching to reveal mossy teeth stained with black. “We can fix you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * “May His great Name grow exalted and sanctified in the world that He created as He willed.” This is the beginning of the Mourner’s Kaddish. My headcanon for what's happening in "Cassettes," let me show you it.


	12. Waking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dana is having problems with time. Meanwhile, Carlos dreams.

Dana wakes surrounded by angels.

Well, she doesn’t, because angels _aren’t real._ One of the non-angelic beings offers her a cold compress, which she gratefully takes and applies to her burning, itching eyes.

“Tear gas,” Old Woman Josie explains. “I told the Sheriff it was a terrible idea, but men are all the same. Canola oil helps, and milk.” Another hovering angel has both handy. She’ll cope with the irritation; one never knows which authorities are watching. 

“Is it bad out there?”

“The riot’s been contained,” Josie says.

“I’m not sure that’s a good thing.” Dana peels herself off the sofa. She aches down to her bones, and she’s sure some of her bruises are in the shape of Vans soles, but she needs to see outside. The car lot is empty, the salesmen in their burrows for the evening, but there are more helicopters circling above than usual. Still, from Josie’s window, the town looks peaceful. Safe. Dana knows better. 

StrexCorp are moving in. Maybe they have moved in. Maybe the desert is already blistered and baked beneath the flame of a never-setting sun. It’s so hard to tell what’s already happened. 

“Have they won yet?” 

Josie shakes her head; there’s still hope, then, even if there’s a certain resignation that arises with having seen the future. Josie seems to understand. “My late husband used to pop back and forth in time too, you know.” She pats Dana on the shoulder. “Just about 12 hours either way, and that was before the ban on time travel, of course. Still confusing as anything, though.”

“Oh,” Dana says. Her personal record of seven years seems pretty impressive by comparison. It’s possible that the dead town City Council showed her when she tried to open the Dog Park exists even farther in the future, but given the current circumstances, she doubts it. “So we can still stop them.” 

“I didn’t say that.”

Dana rubs at her eyes, which turns out to be a bad move. She groans. From mayor to riot victim in a day, and the forces of corporate evil rising like a tide across her beloved city. City Council might not even let her back in without re-education. She feels as though she’s broken some taboo; given Night Vale politics and mores, she probably has. “What can I do?” 

“Tamika Flynn and her militia are going to fight StrexCorp on their own turf,” one of the Erikas would say, if angels were real. “But the war will be fought here, too. And every war needs propaganda.”

She remembers, as if from a dream, Tamika in her office. “StrexCorp have Cecil,” she says.

“But they don’t have the station,” another Erika says. “Not yet.” 

 _The radio tower is falling—the signal doesn’t need it to transmit anymore, it is all around them, in the air they breathe, warm and golden, it seeps into their translucent skin. She watches its skeleton slump in defeat; the chanting grows louder, permeating every blood vessel, ringing in her bones._  

“I’ll go,” she says. “I am also a radio professional.”She presses her face to the cool glass. She can smell the residual chemical reek on her own skin, but she’s about to wade back into chaos to sow confusion, so as much as she’d kill for a shower, it’ll have to wait. “City Council won’t like it.”

“They never do. But we need you, Dana. Take back the air.”

 

* * *

 

 

Carlos’s last dream, before they take him to have his sleep surgically extracted, is of Cecil. 

It’s their fifth date. He knows, because Cecil is wearing a pink unicorn sweater vest that will be seared into Carlos’s memory until he dies. It makes him look like the demented offspring of Mister Rogers and Lisa Frank, and Carlos remembers thinking back then that either he was more infatuated with Cecil than he’d previously realized or Night Vale had left him with irreparable brain damage, because it came off as “adorable” rather than “escaped mental patient.”

He may also have been drinking a bit.

Cecil’s lips are stained with merlot and his breath is hot and boozy next to Carlos’s cheek. Their glasses bump. “Come inside?” 

Carlos’s heart does a scientifically improbable rapid-fire stuttering thing. He may have all the moves of an irresistible force paradox, but even he can tell where this is going. “Okay?” 

Cecil pricks his finger with the sharpened edge of his tiepin. Carlos has seen him do that before, has seen the intricate patterns of raised scars that mark his hands and arms, but he still draws an involuntary gasp. The bloodstones soak up the offering greedily and allow the front door to be opened.

Cecil snakes an arm around his waist and bumps the door shut with his hip, and Carlos forgets to be unnerved by anything he does. “Sweet, beautiful Carlos.” Cecil’s words, mouthed into the collar of Carlos’s flannel shirt, are barely audible.

Carlos has never been great with words, and settles for a clumsy attempt to divest Cecil of the hideous sweater, then the mauve shirt ( _really, Cecil?_ ) underneath it, accidentally running fingers over his ribs. Cecil giggles. 

To be completely honest—as one is, in dreams—Carlos has a moment of thinking that he can’t handle this. Sex, even sex with the multidimensional nightmare creature Cecil claims to be, is easy enough. Carlos is not as experienced as Cecil is, but he’s hardly a blushing virgin. He understands the biological imperative. What currently overwhelms him is a boyfriend who has a rack of collectable plates and bowls but also has three eyes and elaborate runic scarification over everything Carlos can see of his body, and who is ticklish and probably, in all earnestness, refers to sex as “making love,” although it hasn’t _actually_ come up before now. He can’t handle how much Cecil is willing to give him, how effortlessly he loves, how very deeply Carlos could hurt him. His mind can’t find its way around all the various contradictions, and he almost freezes up.

Fortunately, his hands have a will of their own and are more concerned for Carlos’s future happiness than his brain is, and he pushes Cecil into the couch and climbs on top of him. He has enough presence of mind to mumble, “tell me if you want me to stop,” before mercilessly attacking the exposed skin. The mantra of, “kind, responsible Carlos,” turns into, “sadistic, devilish Carlos,” until he’s rendered incomprehensibly speechless, but he’s clearly enjoying it, squirming under Carlos’s weight and laughing in little breathless bursts.

Carlos knows he’s dreaming, summoning a last, poignant memory before he loses this retreat forever, but he’s still startled when Cecil laughs too hard and the tentacles unfurl and lash around him. It happened exactly like that, the first time, and then as now, Cecil abruptly pulls away, detaching the tendrils from Carlos’s arms with his hands.

“Sorry.” The tendrils droop, chastened. It’s kind of cute, and such a far cry from “multidimensional nightmare creature” that he wonders if he should ask Cecil again if the mirror thing is really necessary. He’d like to be able to shave if— _when,_ glorious _when_ —he stays over. “I don’t always have the greatest control. I can retract them if—”

“Um,” Carlos says. “Not complaining.” He reaches for the closest one, then stops himself. He doesn’t want to presume. “Can I?” 

“Please.”

Cecil’s told him, of course, having discovered the hard way that extraneous body parts aren’t something that one’s lovers like to be surprised about. But it’s one thing to hear it casually mentioned in conversation, and another thing to actually touch something so profoundly alien protruding from a body that’s become almost familiar. He’s expecting it to be slick and cold and rubbery, but it’s quite a bit warmer than his hands, and soft. He traces its length to where it protrudes from one of the dorsal vents on either side of Cecil’s spine. 

Cecil settles into the arm of the couch, his middle eye closed and the other two narrowed into slits, and sighs deeply.

“Does that feel good?” This is a data point; he files it away for future reference. It’s turning into an even better night than he anticipated. 

His voice drops to a low purr. “You have _no idea_.”

Scientific curiosity temporarily supersedes his raging erection. “Are they, er, sexual organs?” He winds little spirals around the pseudolimb and Cecil hums happily. 

“They’re physical manifestations of my transdimensional form, Carlos.” As if that answers it. 

“What are they for?” 

Cecil shrugs. “They’re useful for doing the dishes. I can assemble IKEA furniture with one per—” Carlos bends down and takes the tip of the tentacle into his mouth, swirls his tongue around it, and releases it. “—ohmastersofusall do that some more.”

Carlos obliges, rewarded, for his efforts, by Cecil’s fingers tugging through his hair, the other tentacles lifting up his shirt, fumbling with his belt, slithering around his chest like particularly affectionate boa constrictors. “Do you, uh.” A scientist is never lost for words, except when he is. “Other anatomical irregularities that I should—” Even as he says it, he’s tugging at Cecil’s pants (which, let’s not even talk about, but fortunately for everyone involved, the sight of him without clothes more than makes up for the sight of him in them). “—know about?” 

“No,” Cecil says, a tentacle sliding down Carlos’s coccyx. His breath threatens to stop again. “That would be weird.”

“Right,” he says, and Cecil giggles again. “What, er, do you want me to do?” Could that have come out any more awkward? Probably. It’s just a prelude to how completely awkward Carlos is capable of being. 

Cecil just strokes his face. Carlos realizes with equal parts relief and trepidation, that he isn’t actually going to scare Cecil away. Cecil’s fingers have an even rougher texture than the rest of him, pockmarked with scars and healing scabs from the security systems at his apartment and radio station. “Dearest, most perfect Carlos, don’t you know that I’d do anything with you? Though I’ve only filed paperwork for the standard set of mainstream sexual practices, so if you’re into anything kinkier…” 

Carlos kisses him with considerably more confidence than he feels, and it must work, judging from Cecil’s widening eyes. “The usual is fine,” he says, trying not to think too closely on what might be considered kinky in Night Vale. He can’t understand how he can possibly have this effect on anyone, let alone someone like Cecil. He’s still expecting, after over a year, for Cecil’s painfully sincere declarations of heartfelt love to be some practical joke that his team at the lab is playing on him.

For a moment, he just drinks in the vision before him, knowing—because this is a dream and because time nearly always moves forward—just how ephemeral it is. It’s his last dream, Carlos thinks, and he should savor it, and besides, he may never get to touch Cecil like this again.

“I love you,” he says, though he hadn’t, not that night, nor for many nights to come. He should have said it sooner. More directly. They could have had so much more time. “You know that, don’t you? I love you so very much.”

“I wish you were here with me now,” Cecil says sadly. “Why can’t you be here?”

“I am,” Carlos starts to say, then stops himself. This is the one place he doesn’t need to lie. He’s not even sure that he can. The memory bursts like a soap bubble. 

Cecil sits up against the arm of the couch and shakes his head. “I’ve broken it now, haven’t I? Foolish Cecil, what are you doing? Let Carlos have his last dream.”

“It was broken already,” Carlos says. “Or about to break. I’m sorry, Cecil, I am so sorry, but I don’t think I get to save you and Night Vale both.”

Cecil nods. He extends his hand, and Carlos takes it, overcome by an understanding of how much he’d give just to hold Cecil’s hand again. “Come with me.”

They’re moving for the front door, and Carlos wants to pull him back, is suddenly convinced that what’s beyond that door is no longer the dingy hallway outside Cecil’s apartment with the one fluorescent bulb that goes out exactly nine days after it’s fixed. The air is molasses-thick around him, and he can only move slowly, in the direction Cecil’s guiding him.

Beyond the door is a long, wooden dock that branches out from the boardwalk stretching along where the building’s hallway used to be. He’s been here before. It’s part of the Night Vale Harbor and Waterfront Recreation Area, except now there’s real water, an ocean of it, moonlight-dappled black, crashing white froth against the shore. Cecil shifts closer to him, leaning his head against Carlos’s shoulder. He’s so warm that he might be real.

“I knew it would be beautiful,” Cecil says, though aesthetic beauty is merely a neurochemical reaction to visual stimuli and besides, Carlos thinks nothing can be more beautiful than seeing Cecil, happy and whole, one more time. He could stand here forever, slide into a peaceful coma and have this be the last flicker of electricity across his dying brain. But Cecil is already tugging his hand, running along the dock, his bare feet slapping against the sun-bleached wood.

“Cecil, I can’t—” He’s wrapped in limbs and tentacles and falling off the edge of the pier. For a brief, terrifying moment, there’s cold water in his nose and mouth, flooding his lungs, and then there’s not. “—swim. Oh.”

He should have seen it sooner. Tentacles aren’t an evolutionary adaptation for the desert.

“I’ll breathe for you,” Cecil—the other Cecil, the one from the mirror—tells him.

“That’s romantic.”

Romantic isn’t really the word he’d use to describe the scraps of nightmare and half-seen horrors he sees before him. It’s not, Carlos knows, a very accurate picture. Cecil has warned him that his frail, human brain would never be able to process looking at him for any length of time. He’s not even really _looking_ ; the Voice of Night Vale is a series of sound waves so far beyond the spectrum of human hearing that all his other senses must compensate for its presence to even be detectable. The vision is filtered through his unconscious mind’s perception, cobbled together from shadows dancing across the corner of his eye and, quite possibly, an involuntary association between tentacles and tenebrous, immemorial beings of cosmic power thanks to too many nights eating Cheetos and playing _Call of Cthulhu._  

He’s not frightened, though. The being wraps a warm bubble of air around him, and he reminds himself that vertical pupils and gaping maws aside, it’s still more or less Cecil. Or if it isn’t, it’s still an entity that cares for him a great deal.

He reaches a hand through air grown sticky and torpid. Something oozes around it— _great, we’re holding hands_ —and he is drawn in, surrounded, _absorbed,_ a mariner seduced out into the deepest of oceans.

“Is what Kevin said true?” Carlos asks. “Are you actually dead?” 

“Dead, alive. It’s more of a spectrum than a hard division, wouldn’t you say? Ask me something that actually matters.” 

“Why can’t you just free yourself?” Carlos asks.

“I’m trapped in a squishy configuration of bones and organs that I have grown fond of. I could find a new host, but—” 

“—you like this one.” For which Carlos is relieved; he is sure that he could come to love this creature in another form, but his body has become accustomed to a weight on the other side of the bed, a deep, rolling voice, even the stupid unicorn sweaters.

“If you look at a child’s drawing of the moon,” the Voice of Night Vale tells him, “it appears to be a flat disc. You know something extends beyond it, into three dimensions, into planes beyond your vision.”

“And if the paper is torn?”

“The moon remains. But not the facet of it committed to paper.”

It’s just his mind, straining to make sense of something that science cannot presently explain. The real Cecil isn’t convinced that the moon _isn’t_ a flat disc or, furthermore, that it isn’t out to get him. 

“Can’t you fight them?”

“I’m just a sound, Carlos. They have a god.”

“Let me stay here, then.”

“Night Vale is more important than I am,” the Voice says. Carlos wonders if the real Cecil, who is not a construction of his dreaming mind, who is more human than he is monster, who, somewhere, is alone and scared and in pain, would agree. “They’re on to you now. You’ll have to keep running.”

Carlos wishes he could drown in him instead. He’s never been so tired in his life. “Can’t I just…”

“Time nearly always moves forward,” the Voice sadly reminds him. “You’ll still have this. Buried deep in the sand, in a box with a lock they can never open. Please, Carlos, keep me with you, no matter what—”

“Always,” Carlos sobs, but even now the dream is dissolving, dissipating into radio static and fractured sparks of light and color.

He wakes. 

And never sleeps again.


	13. The Toll

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tamika reaches Desert Bluffs with a new ally along for the ride.

A knock, and then a kindly, “Hello, Mrs. Flynn” from the front hallway. 

Upstairs in her room, Tamika hurriedly bunches more socks into her knapsack. There are never enough socks when planning a stealth assault on a vast corporate empire. The portable radio plays the opening notes of Kevin’s show, and when he speaks, he sounds even happier than usual. She hasn’t turned it off since Josie gave it to her. The broadcast is like nails on a chalkboard and she’s sick of it, sick of Kevin’s jocularity and the menace lurking just beneath, sick of the theme song and the sunny weather, but there’s always a chance that Carlos will get another message through, so she keeps listening.

Carlos hasn’t been on since the first time. It doesn’t mean that something has happened to him. The constant cloud of terror under which she lives isn’t big enough to admit Carlos too; she tells herself that he’ll be fine. He’ll have to be fine.

Technically, the show is a repeat; Kevin’s show is in the morning, but they replay it around mid-afternoon when Cecil’s show should start, hijacking NVCR’s signal and gradually wearing down the ability of Night Vale citizens to resist the aggressive new developments that are bulldozing their way through City Council’s Gordian Knot of red tape. In the last few days though, she’s started to notice subtle differences between the two broadcasts, even though the second is a recording of the first. Yesterday, there was a rustling noise beneath everything he said, like the beating of moth wings amplified until it was as loud as a whisper. The day before, the weather had changed from major to minor one during the second broadcast, though every word and every inflection in Kevin’s voice and even the hiss of the tape had been otherwise identical.

Tamika wants to think the discrepancies bode well, signal that someone else is out there, still fighting. There’s no chance, however, that the stranger at the door is a good sign.

“I’m sorry,” she hears her mother say. “Who are you again?”

“Truancy officer,” the man says. “Night Vale Academy.”

“That charter school?” Tamika zips up her backpack and opens her bedroom window. “Tamika goes to the public high school.” And, Tamika thinks, they don’t even _have_ truancy officers at her school; they have truancy bears, which is why student absenteeism at Night Vale High School is practically non-existent.*

Tamika is the leader of an armed militia, but she is also a 14-year-old girl, and she pauses, crouched on her windowsill, fretting about what they’ll do to her mother if she disappears. She could run downstairs now, and if there’s only one man, if he’s not very strong or not very prepared, take him out with her slingshot.

But after that, there is nowhere to run. Half the shops are already closed, with notices pinned to the door that the building is slated for re-zoning. Just last week, all of the school crossing guards were replaced by subcontracted intersection escorts, who do the same job for half the wage and far more efficiently, smiling vacantly the whole time. It’s a slow invasion, but it’s an invasion nevertheless, and there’s not a place in Night Vale that’s safe for Tamika or her mother. Still, she feels a sharp pang of guilt. The instincts for self-reliance and gritty determination run strong in the Flynn family, but she’s not sure if her mother will survive another picnic.

She’ll just have to save the town before they can use her loved ones against her. Resolved, Tamika jumps out the window. She lands in the succulent garden, her ankle twisting painfully under her weight, and she runs, dragging her left foot behind her, for the Dog Park.

They’re on her almost immediately, two men in grey, ill-fitting suits, and Tamika almost laughs. That’s _it_? They sent helicopters last time. She’s not as fit as she was at this time last year, and her ankle is throbbing, but she’s half their size and wearing a tank top and jeans. She leads them through the faceless stucco monoliths of the community college, slipping in and out of clusters of students, through the polished and austere hallways of that august institution, and by the time she emerges into the blackened ruins of Sammy’s Ultimate Sliceria (there’s another one of those licenses pinned to a charred doorframe), she’s left them panting and sweating somewhere behind the Earth Sciences Building.

As she crosses Somerset Road, her heart skips; there are two small figures, and one very large one, at the gates of the Dog Park. She checks her phone and, indeed, she’s missed a text from Yasi.

_THEY GOT KYLEE._

Tamika curses under her breath and stops to take her slingshot out of her backpack. _The Tale of Gengi_ is a nuanced examination of the lives of aristocratic women during the Heian period, and it is also just heavy enough to take out the big guy if he’s a StrexCorp lackey holding the other two hostage. It’s only when she hears Deanna cry out, “Tamika, wait!” that she sees who the big guy is. It’s not, in fact, a guy at all.

“ _Megan_?”

Megan Wallaby, and the body attached to her, swivel around. The Nulogorskian man’s broad face makes something like a smile.

“Hi Tamika.” The words sit uneasily on the man’s thick tongue, but Tamika has to admit that it’s much easier to understand her now. She lowers her slingshot and grins back.

“That truancy officer came for her right after they scooped up Kylee,” Ahmed says. “They’re coming for all of us. Yasi went after her—she wanted us to come too, but…”

Tamika shakes her head. “You did the right thing. If we don’t stop StrexCorp in Desert Bluffs, they’re going to take us out one by one here.” She looks up at Megan. “You should probably go back home, though. It’s me they’re after.”

“Coming,” Megan says. “With you. Need me.”

Tamika frowns. She can’t help but think of Megan as a little kid, but Megan’s not that much younger than she was when she fought her first librarian. And she’s almost seven feet tall now, so there’s brute force on their side.

“Okay,” she agrees. “But if there’s trouble, you need to run the other way. Your parents would _kill_ me if anything happened to you.” She looks at the others, then to the gate. The latch is high in the black cast iron door, almost out of the reach of her short arms. This is, bar nothing, the stupidest thing she has ever done in her life. “I’ll go in first,” she says. “If I die, or something eats me, uh—find another way to save the town.”

Deanna impulsively hugs Tamika, and she clings back, grateful for the show of support. “Uh, good luck,” Ahmed says.

She breaks away from her friends. Slingshot in one hand, she lifts the latch. The great door creaks on its hinges as it opens.

Tamika steps into the Dog Park. 

She’s aware, first, of the cold. She hugs herself and rubs her bare arms, now prickled with gooseflesh. There’s no grass beneath her feet, just a thick, brownish fog. Tall trees, fashioned from the same black iron as the gates, grow in dense patches with no clear path between them. She picks her way past the trees, cutting her arm on a low-hanging leaf. Scowling, Tamika pulls her hoodie from her backpack and slides it over her head. 

“Now I’m a hooded figure too. Boo!” She knows it's tempting fate. “I’m _not scared._ ”

The hooded figure emerges from the trees. There’s no visible sky, or light source, but its shadow somehow finds Tamika, and the cold air grows colder. It is not walking a dog. It does not speak, but the burst of static hissing that explodes in her ears somehow manages to convey to her that she should, indeed, be _incredibly fucking scared, like, pissing her pants scared right now._

“I need to get to Desert Bluffs,” Tamika says, daring to look it straight where its face would be, despite all taboos and regulations advising against exactly that. When she was young, she found the hooded figures terrifying, but now they’re almost familiar. She’s certain the thing could, and eagerly would, kill her, but she can also imagine a number of less pleasant deaths.

A hiss vibrates through every cell in her body. It’s not a no.

“Now would be nice.”

The cold that spreads over her arms becomes a tangible vibration, smooth and viscous as an oil slick. It slides into her mouth, down her throat, coating her lungs. She receives the message, as intended, that the hooded figure can do as she wishes, and bring her friends across as well, but that there is a cost, a toll if you will, that she and she alone will pay. Tamika does not have the impression that the hooded figure will tell her what this cost is.

“Fine,” she says. It’s hard to speak through the ice hardening around her vocal cords. “By the way, what do you think StrexCorp will do to you and the Dog Park if they win? I’m just saying.”

Thermal noise originating from beyond the Earth’s atmosphere informs her that oh, and yes, the trip is one way.

Tamika suddenly and intensely misses her mother.

“Yeah, I kinda figured.”

The hooded figure appears to shrug, and then throws back its hood.

Ice erupts from Tamika’s mouth, crystallizes on her eyeballs, across her skin, inside her ears and nose. Robbed of her senses, she is aware only of infinite stillness. The molecules that make up Tamika Flynn shudder and collide and cannibalize each other. For a moment she is suspended, bodiless, in the Void. She reaches out, asks a question, and the answer shatters her heart into a million, billion fragments.

When she is able to see again, on her hands and knees in the dry dust of a strange town, her face is damp with tears. She can’t remember what they took from her, but she knows it was important, and precious, and she shouldn’t have ever let go of it. A few seconds later, her friends are through, and she collapses, sobbing, in Deanna’s arms. None of the others look like they’ve had something vital torn from them, and she wishes that she could be grateful for that small mercy, but all she can feel is the loss. Someone has taken a great ice cream scoop and hollowed her right out. Nothing there, just a shell of the girl that used to exist. 

But she is not even allowed the luxury of grief for that small, unknowable thing. She is behind enemy lines. She can see, among the sloping dun hills, the shining silhouette of the Desert Bluff’s skyline.

“Let’s move,” she says grimly, and though her soul is rent in half, her body obeys.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * The Night Vale Public School Board emphatically denies that it employs truancy bears and is in full compliance with municipal animal cruelty and labor legislation. The reports of mauling are either rumors spread by students desperate for any excuse to hand in their work late, or the unfortunate result of chance encounters with plastic bags. Either way, the Night Vale Public School Board denies all liability.


	14. Win-Win

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Everyone is perfect in Desert Bluffs, but some are more perfect than others.

“How do you feel?” Lauren asks.

Carlos feels sharp and alert, as if his eyelids have been surgically excised. Cold-shower, precision-instrument awake. He could step out of these doors and run forever, except he probably can’t step out of these doors. 

The device is there, but it also feels clean and new, its hum perfectly calibrated to his thoughts. It’s almost pleasant. The pain in his skull is gone. All the pain is gone. He has never felt so _alive._

“Perfect,” Carlos says. “I feel perfect.” 

He doesn’t really; there’s something nagging at the back of his mind, like the shadow of a nightmare he’ll never have again. He ignores it. Lauren is expectant, and he doesn’t want to disappoint her. He hates her; his hate is a bright star, acid green and burning, but she has liberated him from time, from the lint-stuffed clockwork that fails to properly commemorate all of the seconds he will no longer waste. 

“Don’t move too quickly,” Aviva says. “You might be a little—disoriented.”

He’s in a laboratory room that’s set up exactly like the one in which they’re keeping Cecil. The one-way mirror is on the same wall. He wonders if it’s the same mirror as he makes his way towards it.

The first thing he notices is that they’ve shaved his head. They’d have to, of course; sleep removal is brain surgery, but there are no sutures, not a single mark beneath a day’s growth of stubble. He can live with it; his hair will grow back if he lives that long. He’s never understood why everyone is always so obsessed with his hair anyway, and it’s the least of all his losses. 

He’s wearing the same bloodied lab coat, but there’s a fresh shirt on underneath, the implications of which he’d rather not consider. He unfastens the top three buttons. His chest is unmarked, not even a scratch where Kevin’s blade cut into him. His hands fly up to his face; there had been a scar on his cheek from a very tiny, very sharp javelin, and it’s not there anymore. They’ve removed his glasses, but his reflection in the mirror is in focus. It’s hard to tell from just stubble, but it looks like there’s less silver in his hair, too. _Perfect._

“What did you do to me?” he asks, though he already knows. They’ve taken away his sleep, his dreams. They’ve left him without his only hiding place. Doug, the empty desert, the Unmodified Sumerian codes, are all beyond his reach. There is only one reality, and its entirety exists within the walls of the StrexCorp Synergists Inc. Distribution Center. “Where’s Cecil? And—Kevin?” Carlos has a moment of desperately hoping that the answers to his last two questions are different before it strikes him as odd that, with every other source of pain and distraction removed, with nothing else standing between him and the destruction he must sow, his love for Cecil is still there, like a stubborn abscess at the point of rupture just below his skin. 

Lauren beams at him like an indulgent teacher whose student has just said something incredibly clever. “Cecil’s where he always is. Kevin’s show is starting right about now. And as for the last—well, Aviva can explain better than I can.”

The strain on Aviva’s face is obvious, presumably to Lauren as well. “You’ll have no need for sleep anymore,” she says. “Isn’t that great? Think of how much more time you’ll have for science. We can speed up the timeline; working around the clock, we could have it finished a month! Two weeks, even!” 

He’s not free, but he can still negotiate. His cover is already blown; there’s no “Subject 37,” no pretence that he’s here by choice. Gloves off. “I want to see Cecil first. Kevin hurt him. This was not part of our arrangement.”

“As I recall,” Lauren says waspishly, “you broke your end of the contract first. But we are not unreasonable. You can see him.” 

He closes his eyes, his hands braced against the mirror all that’s keeping him upright. It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Lauren asks Aviva if she can take care of it. Aviva says yes, she’d be happy to. Carlos is going to destroy Night Vale, because every other escape route has been barred. And he’s been made to feel _happy_ about it. 

 _Sorry,_ he thinks at no one in particular. _I really did think I was better than this._

Aviva takes him down the corridor—it _is_ the same mirror; he wonders what’s behind it—but, just before they reach Cecil’s room, pulls him into a broom closet. He starts to protest and she shoves a hand over his mouth. The other hand grabs for a boxy gun hidden in her lab coat.

There’s a flash of white light, and then a strange, empty silence in his head, as if instantly he is the only person left in there. The lights have gone out.

“Is that an EMP?” Her palm muffles his words, but he moves to examine the gun. The device is offline. It’s quiet because his brain is no longer transmitting its every thought to StrexCorp’s upper management. His eyes widen.

“We have ten minutes. Just listen.” She takes her hand away. 

“Listening.” Which is going to be hard, with the way his heart is hammering. He can’t listen, he needs to go now, destroy the bomb while he still can and get Cecil out of here.

“I’ve worked it out. It’s a classic win-win. We can all get what we want.”

“Neat,” he says, and he’s not even being that sarcastic. Just how much company Kool-Aid did they pump into his veins while he was unconscious?

“I did an unproductive thing,” Aviva says. “I lied, just now, to Lauren. It’s not weeks before we’ll have the bomb completed, Carlos, it’s days. Maybe hours. You’ll be working non-stop on the project, with no sleep, and you won’t be self-sabotaging or finding some way to slow down development.”

“I know,” he replies. “I just worked it out too.”

“Night Vale, at least the Night Vale you knew, is doomed. But there’s a wing of this building that’s under renovation just past the labs, and that has an emergency exit that’s right by the parking lot. They’ll be watching you until the bomb’s built, but after; well, we like to have fun. There’ll be an office party at the very least. You could get Subject 37 out.”

Carlos stares at her, searches her face in the darkness for whoever she’d been before StrexCorp had gotten their claws into her. “Why would I—why would _you?_ ”

“Because it benefits everyone. I was in that room too, you know. I heard everything, even the things you didn’t. They can’t kill 37 because the Voice will just go to someone else, right?”

He nods.

“And the Voice is kind of in the way of their expansion plans. That’s why they needed it here, away from anywhere it can influence people. Well, that, and we really wanted to see how it ticks.”

It. Sure. Even having seen the reflection, even having the thing shake up the contents of his skull like a centrifuge, he can’t fear it, can’t even conceive of it being a separate entity from Cecil. He’s even afraid for it, suffering right along with its host, unwilling to part from the damaged mortal body for which it had come to feel a strange affection. 

“So here’s what you need to do—when it comes time, grab him and run. Not back to Night Vale, somewhere else, someplace safe.” 

“And then what?” 

“The rest of your lives, I guess. He won’t be a threat to StrexCorp, not all on his own where he has no power.”

 _Like a child’s drawing of the moon._ “He’d just be a facet, wouldn’t he? An ordinary person. Well, with a third eye and tentacles. But—basically human.” 

“And no longer a threat to StrexCorp’s expansion plans,” Aviva stresses again. “Not for fifty or sixty years or however long he lives.” By which time StrexCorp will have cemented its hold over whatever’s left of the town. 

He imagines taking Cecil back to the University Of What It Is. No, that wouldn’t work, Carlos has already burned his bridges there. He’d have to go farther back to find some connection, some sense of belonging. He imagines taking Cecil back to Eloy, pictures the scorn on his father’s face. _So not only are you a nerd, not only do you have no interest in taking over the garage, and not only are you gay and you’re not going to have children to carry on the family name, but now you’re telling me that you’re dating a squid?_ Yeah, his dad would just _love_ Cecil. 

“Everybody wins,” Carlos says.

“It’s more than what most people get.”

He could teach at some state college, he thinks; his credentials are still pretty impressive. Cecil could work at the campus radio station, if they had one, going through the motions of the things that he used to do, reporting on a sky that merely alternated between shades of blue and grey. He imagines them moving in together—as they’d planned to, before a giant, StrexCorp-shaped obstacle had landed in their path. He imagines them with a mortgage, bickering over expenses. Not kids, it’s far too late for that, but maybe a dog; they’re both dog people, Khoshekh aside.

He imagines Cecil losing his innocence by degrees. Having his skin and his sexuality suddenly matter to strangers. Trying to make sense of a reality that didn’t unconditionally adore him.

He imagines Cecil finally giving up and growing old.

None of it’s pleasant. He can’t picture Cecil happy outside of Night Vale. You can’t fall down a rabbit hole and bring the Mad Hatter back home for tea with you. 

“You took away all my scars,” Carlos says. “Why not that one too? Why not make me just another mindless cog? Was it an accident?” He’s not romantic enough to think that his love for Cecil, strong though it remains, is powerful enough to overcome whatever brainwashing they’ve done to him to turn him cheerfully resigned to the task at hand.

“It was on purpose,” Aviva says. “You’re more happy when you’re productive, but you’ll be more productive if you’re suffering.” Almost apologetically: “We did studies. The Smiling God is all-powerful; He could have made us perfectly happy. Not pretend-happy, truly happy. He has his reasons.” She snorts. “And we _know_ how to motivate you, Carlos. We listened to you, out there in the desert. You pulled away from him the second we approached you—you loved him enough that you’d sacrifice your relationship, your own happiness, to protect him from us.”

“Yeah, well,” Carlos says. What he wouldn’t give now to have been kinder then. Without the device monitoring his thoughts, his mind is free to run through all the myriad ways in which he’s managed to utterly fail Cecil. “It didn’t work.”

She looks at her correctly functioning watch, a not at all subtle reminder that the technicians will have the power back up and running soon.

“What’s in it for you?” he asks.

“I’m coming with you,” Aviva replies. “Desert Bluffs, Night Vale, Pine Cliff…these places don’t matter. They are so small, so inconsequential. I’ve felt the Smiling God’s love, seen what it can do. Think of all of the wars, the crime, the disease and starvation. We could fix all of it. We could change the world!” Carlos shudders. His father could slave away his old age for StrexCorp, which is somehow worse than imagining him working at the garage for the rest of his life. “But not with Lauren at the helm. She’s not a scientist. She has no _vision._ ” She squeezes his hand. “We don’t want the same thing, but we don’t want opposite things, either.”

Carlos huffs a sigh and slumps against the wall. She’s not wrong. He could never have saved both Cecil and Night Vale, but he’d been convinced all along that it was the town that would survive, that Cecil would have wanted it that way. Now he gets to condemn the world to StrexSlavery along with Night Vale, and he feels sick to even contemplate it, but— 

Cecil is resilient, he decides. He can survive as an exile. After all, Carlos has managed it all these years. 

“Okay.”

“One minute. On Launch Day, meet me back here. Armed, if you can manage it.”

He closes his eyes. He indulges a quick, incredibly unrealistic fantasy wherein [music plays](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QiYIbL1jOQ) and somehow when it finishes, he’s beneath the black sky, the lights above the Arby’s shining overhead, and Cecil is in his arms, safe and blissfully content. Everything is fine.

The lights come back on, and he feels the gears of his prison whir back to life.

“Time to go,” Aviva says. “We shouldn’t keep any of them waiting.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Carlos replies dryly.


	15. Break-ins

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dana and Maureen try to take back NVCR. Cecil tries to take back Carlos.

Night Vale is quiet tonight, which could be a sign that all of its citizens have had their vocal cords scheduled for replacement, or that the Secret Police is conducting one of its regular “curl under the table with your head between your knees and pray that the bad thing goes away on its own” drills, but is most likely an indication that something is _really_ wrong. Dana picks her way along deserted streets, past shuttered windows and empty lots where houses once stood. The silence is so profound, so all-encompassing, that she even throws a friendly wave at the huddle of balaclava-clad figures who have followed her from Josie’s house to the radio station.

She shuts her eyes against another flashback. Flashforward. Time is breaking loose from its moorings.

_The Sheriff’s people aren’t the first line of defense—that particular honor goes to the Boy Scout troop, which holds out an impressive 13 hours after StrexCorp takes over—but they, against all predictions, do eventually join in the uprising, and while they may be secretive and masked, their blood is as red as anyone else’s._

When she’s recovered and the time in her head is roughly congruent with what she sees before her, Dana approaches the radio station.

Even the station has changed. Its solid concrete walls were once intimidating, when she was a brand new intern eager to impress Cecil Palmer and Station Management. When she returned from the desert, they had become familiar, welcoming. Now they are part of some ever-shifting new reality, alien and ephemeral. Black stains, left over from some dust storm, wash over the grey slabs, like scorch marks will at some unspecified point in her future timeline. Its antennae looks skeletal against a sky the color of bruised aubergine, which is different from that one time that the antennae actually _was_ made out of bone. There’s a rusted padlock on the door, though she’s almost certain that the station was occupied only a month ago.

She tries it anyway; she doesn’t have the key anymore, so she ends up just shaking the lock uselessly, and that’s when she feels cold metal at the back of her neck. 

“Don’t move,” a woman’s voice says. “Turn around slowly.”

“Those are mutually contradictory,” Dana says. She raises her hands. Turns. A woman a few years younger than herself, wearing a threadbare headscarf, is pointing a letter opener at her. “Hey Maureen.”

“Dana!” She pockets the letter opener and throws her arms around her ex-colleague, then freezes and goes red. “Sorry, is that bad? You’re the mayor now; I should show more respect.”

Dana laughs. “It’s fine.” There’s a rustling behind her, and two others, a young man and woman, emerge from the stringy wall of California sagebrush that was doing a terrible job of concealing them. “Are you okay?”

“The three of us have been living under the tables in the break room for weeks, eating gluten-free ramen noodles and fighting off Station Management with office supplies,” Maureen says. “Other than that, great, yeah.”

“Why are you—you got _in_ the station?”

“Well,” Maureen twists her fingers in the fringes of her scarf. “We got into the break room; there’s a window open in the women’s restroom. The rest of the station—”

“Station Management.” 

“A lot of it. Kind of everywhere.”

Dana shudders. She’s never forgotten about poor Jerry Hartman. Still, she was more or less commanded by angels—or at least by their earthly representative—to win the station back. And as leader of their friendly desert community, the owners of the community radio station technically answer to Dana’s authority. Sort of. At least she hopes so, rather fervently. 

“Show me.”

The ragged party makes its way around the corner to the back of the station. Sure enough, the bathroom window is open wide enough for a small person, or very determined larger person, to squeeze through. Dana eyes it warily.

“Out of curiosity,” she says, “why not just go back home to your families? Why live in the station?” 

Maureen shifts from one foot to the other. “Uh. Apparently the hours you spend blinking in and out of existence, trapped in an otherworldly desert, or swept away by mysterious winds in the service of community radio don’t actually count towards a college credit.”

“Right.” She has a brief moment—and it is _very_ brief—of thinking that Maureen’s right about Cecil being an asshole. Then she remembers that he’s a prisoner of StrexCorp and is almost certainly having a worse time of it than any of them, if he’s even still alive. Dana grips the edge of the windowsill and hoists herself up through the window. She hears Maureen, followed by the two other interns, scramble up behind her.

A thin layer of grime covers every surface in the women’s washroom, which is not unusual and probably a result of Intern Petra (rest in peace, your bravery in the face of the highly localized quasi-sentient tornados that recently invaded the station will not be forgotten, etc.) and her tendency to bleed cactus sap when stressed or anxious. Maureen leads them silently out into the hallway. The break room door is shut and barricaded with chairs; at the end of the hallway is the fire door to the stairwell. Dana reaches for the small razor blade she still keeps tucked in her wallet, but Maureen stops her.

“Just look first.”

Dana peers out the white-streaked safety glass in time to see a thick tentacle strike the window. Startled, she shrieks and jumps backwards.

“So we haven’t gone up there,” the other girl says. 

“Yeah.”

“Intern Edgar did.”

Dana looks at the two new interns. “I take it neither of you are Intern Edgar.” The door is solid, reinforced steel, and feeling braver, she looks through again. Station Management is oozing over the stairs, up the walls, even colonizing the ceiling with some sort of waxy black substance. _Gods above and below, Josie,_ Dana thinks, _how am I supposed to save the town from StrexCorp when I can’t even get up the stairs?_ “I’m open to ideas.”

Resounding silence. Maureen waves her little letter-opener with a sardonic grin. 

“Great.”

The two interns look at each other, and then the boy reaches out his hand. “Intern Rashid,” he says. “That’s Intern Iris. You know. In case you need to inform our families later.”

Maureen makes a sour face, and Dana averts her eyes, and she’s almost going to give the order when she hears a sound like a rusty nail bristling with tetanus being dragged along a toothache. She turns around to see, hovering four feet off the floor, a black furry body somersaulting in the doorway to the men’s washroom.

“Khoshekh! Here, boy!”

The for-lack-of-a-better-term cat purrs—if you can call the sense of having the insides of your eardrums scraped off by auditory stimuli while gripped with a non-specific yet troubling unease a “purr”—and undulates his tendrils. Not for the first time, Dana finds herself wondering if he’s not so much a cat as the larval form of whatever Station Management is, and maybe that’s why they’re so weirdly protective of him and his kittens.

Then again, they _are_ weirdly protective of him and his kittens. 

“Guys?” Dana says. “Do any of you have cat treats?”

“I have cheese,” Iris says. “I think he likes cheese.” She pulls a squishy package of orange processed cheddar out of her pocket and rips open the plastic. Khoshekh makes a noise that Dana registers as either approval of this development or an announcement of their impending doom. Either way, he floats closer when Iris waves the cheese around. 

It’s a gamble, but. It’s not every day that he’s able to leave his position in the washroom, and she chooses to imbue this development with deeper meaning. She makes a blood offering to the lock and the door swings open. 

Khoshekh mews and floats in front of them. Miracle of miracles, the sea of tentacles allows them to pass, folding in behind them as they follow the cat up the staircase to the recording studio. Station Management is here too, oozing out of its office to drip over the soundboard. Glossy black speleothems, branching dendrite structures from their oily columns, have shaped the walls into an alien landscape. She’s almost glad Cecil isn’t here to see this.

“Good kitty,” Dana says, carefully scratching behind his ears while avoiding his spine ridge. Khoshekh yawns and winks at her, tilting his head towards the ceiling. 

The others see it too; above the window to the recording booth, the ON-AIR sign flashes red, though as far as Dana can tell, there’s no actual electricity coming into the station. Inside, except for the blood and ichor, the room is exactly as it was the day of Cecil’s disappearance. His headphones are draped over the chair.

“So which one of us goes in?” Dana asks. 

“You’ve been around the longest,” Rashid says. “And Cecil likes you the most.” Iris wrinkles her nose. “Oh come on, you know it’s true.” 

Dana approaches the door. Hesitates. “I lost my ID card in the desert.”

“Oh for fuck’s sake.” Maureen swipes her card. The door opens. Everyone files in after her; no one wants to be the one left outside with the venomous floating cat and restive tentacles. 

“That’s—a lot of blood,” Iris says. “Do you think…?”

There are two photos on Cecil’s desk; one of him, in a tie, which Dana always found a little weird and narcissistic, the other of Carlos, handsome and grinning in his laboratory. Both have their eyes scratched out, as if to eliminate any doubt as to where they are now. There’s blood everywhere, splattered over the desk and recording equipment, on the back of the chair, in a thick streak leading out of the studio. Dana winces.

Under the desk, she can see the cord from the microphone. It’s frayed and severed and from what she can tell, has probably been like that for years. She has to orient herself to make sure that she’s not gone forward in time again. 

“I think it’s always been like that,” Maureen says. Dana slides back out. The microphone is a blank Word document with a flashing cursor. She has no idea how to start. She reaches out and touches it—sticky; she doesn’t want to think with what—then pulls back. 

“What do I say?” It’s been a long time since she worked at the station. She’s not Cecil; she doesn’t have a third eye that tells her everything that goes on in the town. Her latest venture outside hadn’t ended well, and she has a strong feeling that if she sends the interns out to report the news, it will end even less well for them.

But she knows she must speak. The town is in chaos. They need someone to rally them together, to give them hope, and while this role is not traditionally filled by the town’s leader, she’s the best they’ll probably get right now. And if there is a chance, even a small one, that by broadcasting, they can interrupt Kevin’s signal…

She leans in close, her lips practically brushing the microphone, the scent of copper in her nostrils. Maureen is flipping switches outside. A hum of life breathes through the equipment, independent of electrical current.

“Milk is just liquid meat. We are all, eventually, just liquid meat.” She pauses. On the other side of the glass, Maureen nods encouragement. “Welcome to Night Vale.”

 

* * *

 

The pain comes in waves, slow pulses inward from his lacerated and bruised extremities. Each breath is a splinter into his lungs. There’s nothing else to do beyond acquiescence. He’ll die here, because the alternative is to become Kevin, and death is preferable. Desirable, even, given his current state. After the guards hauled Carlos away, Kevin was left with only Lauren’s instructions to not gnaw off anything vital.

Kevin is gone now. Cecil is aware that time has passed, but he can’t tell how much. The heat is unbearable, a tangible force pressing down on him, spinning a tight cocoon of delirium around his brain. He tries to look beyond the bloodstained walls, to observe the town he will never see again, but his vision is clouded, the figures distant and vague, as if he’s watching them through a thick windowpane smeared with Vaseline. The thought crosses his mind that he’s never felt so alone—not even in the Dark Room, not even in those days he’s not supposed to remember and mostly doesn’t—and then Lauren opens the door and Carlos walks in and he’s immediately several degrees lonelier.

His first instinct, silly, shallow creature that he is, is to demand the head of whoever did _that_ to Carlos’s magnificent hair. He’s barely recognizable without the curling black waves and his wire-rimmed glasses, dressed in StrexCorp’s bright yellow. His handsome, square-jawed face looks thinner without its flowing frame, pinched, as if hundreds of scorpions are stinging him at any given moment. To Cecil’s surprise, Lauren closes the door, with her on the other side, and leaves them alone together.

He’s less surprised that Carlos barely looks at him and doesn’t speak. Carlos has seen what he is now. StrexCorp doesn’t need to brainwash him, Cecil thinks; all they need to do is simply, among all their evasions and propaganda, let slip a little truth. It might have started in the desert, with Carlos’s gradual assertions that he belonged there and not in Night Vale—not with Cecil—but it ends here, with one of them a dutiful employee and the other an object to be studied, to be scrutinized and dissected and dissolved until nothing remains. It’s yet another form of torture, one far worse than the physical pain they’ve inflicted on him, to have Carlos so close and so distant at the same time.

Still. He tries. “Can’t you just…” Carlos blinks as if startled. Cecil swallows. He’s seldom at a loss for words, except where Carlos is concerned. “…it hurts, Carlos. I don’t know how much more I can take.” 

Carlos moves mechanically, each of his steps commanded by remote, until he’s close enough that Cecil can smell him beneath the off-gas plastic reek of his company-issued lab coat. Cecil reaches for his hand—oh, to just have Carlos hold his hand again, even after everything that’s all he wants in the world—but the restraints don’t allow any of his limbs enough range of movement, and Carlos won’t bridge the rest of the distance. 

Cecil wonders how he could have ever been so foolish to think that this brilliant, beautiful man would ever stay in love with him. 

“They will not hurt you again,” Carlos says slowly, his voice as resonant as ever, if a little stilted. “Not if I—fulfill my part in the contract.”

“And what’s that?” 

Carlos glances at the one-way mirror as if asking for permission, then tells him about the weapon.

It doesn’t take long, even with Carlos’s unnecessarily technical explanation. Cecil is quiet for few seconds after. His chest aches, as much from wanting to touch Carlos as from his injuries. “Why?” he asks. His voice is tiny, scraped raw, as if the ancient entity that lives inside him has fled, leaving him just a man who, in most respects, died nearly three decades ago.

“I was trying to stop them,” Carlos says, and Cecil can almost breathe again until he adds, “StrexCorp showed me the errors in my reasoning.”

Cecil shakes his head violently from side to side. “No, you need to fight it. Whatever they’ve done to you, you’re stronger than that. You can still—” 

“I am sorry.” He sounds like he is. “I can’t come back here anymore. They need me to work on the project full time now, until it’s completed. I came to say goodbye.” 

Frantic, Cecil strains against his bonds, which only tightens them, twisting him into a position that cramps up his already sore back. “Don’t go. Carlos…” He silently appeals to the Voice, to the cold and distant gods who hold dominion over him, to come up with the words that will break StrexCorp’s hold over Carlos. “Stay.” 

The gods allow him this much. Carlos doesn’t move. _Oh. That actually worked. Huh._

“Give me your hand,” Cecil says. It’s not pleading this time. He didn’t get his reputation as a hard-hitting journalist by being completely and utterly pathetic. It’s a command, and while the thing in the mirror can’t free him or protect him from Kevin’s teeth or knives, it is fairly good at making people listen. 

Carlos, lovely, wonderful Carlos with his gaze as dark and serious as the Void—he could drown in those eyes, and with his last breath still be crying out Carlos’s name—folds long fingers around Cecil’s. Cecil almost breaks down, then, the whole of existence narrowed down to that soft skin touching his, his own unworthy molecules in contact with Carlos’s perfection. For a moment the agony wracking his body doesn’t matter, there’s only his scientist, compelled into this gesture of comfort, and Cecil just wants this _so much_ , he could die from those elegant fingers resting warmly against his palm. Then Carlos yelps and jerks back as if stung, and the hand goes to the back of his neck.

 _Interesting._ Cecil didn’t see it before, but with his head shaved, the glittering metal at the base of his skull is obvious. If he can just get close enough to rip it off…

For the first time, he feels a flutter of hope, accompanying a dawning understanding.

“My poor, morally compromised Carlos,” he says. “I wish I could curl up in that hollow place inside you and sleep forever.”

Carlos flinches.

“This is not about us, Cecil.”

“There isn’t an _us_.” Carlos slumps as if shot, each one of Cecil’s words a well-aimed bullet. He’s felt so helpless for such a long time that inflicting pain on someone else, scratching a cruel gash across someone else’s reality, is viscerally satisfying, right up until he remembers that it’s his beloved he’s hurting. “I know that. I know it’s over. Imaginary love is preferable to no love. Can we do that, Carlos? Can’t you just hold me?”

“I can’t,” Carlos says through gritted teeth, and Cecil thinks that he has to keep up the attack. He needs to test Carlos’s limits—or, more specifically, the limits of whatever’s controlling him. Maybe if he pushes hard enough, he can cause the metal thing clamped to Carlos’s skull to overload. Carlos’s face is red and strained, and Cecil knows it’s his own doing, that it’s his proximity or voice or existence on what he can only assume is the same dimensional plane that the device reacts to.

“I hate your haircut,” Cecil says. “And your job. It’s a horrible job and a worse haircut.” His fingers and tentacles stretch as far as they can in Carlos’s direction, but it’s not far enough, and Carlos won’t make the mistake of touching him twice. “But I love you more than anything, darling Carlos, and I missed you so much.”

“Don’t. You shouldn’t.” He’s gone from crimson to pale and shaky, and Cecil is increasingly certain. Maybe Carlos can see the Voice all the time now, maybe it’s that, but Cecil doesn’t think so. Carlos, of perfect form and dazzling intellect, is first and foremost a scientist. He wouldn’t be disgusted, or, at the least, he’d still want to understand further. He’d want to reach into the mirror and draw out the reflection with his own gloved hands, even if it drove him into insanity, because that would be better than leaving a mystery unexamined. Something beyond fear is repelling him. It’s still a punch to the heart, but his heart has endured worse. Cecil does his best to remain positive.

“I need to leave,” Carlos says. He turns, and Cecil _could_ probably force him to stay, but he’s concerned that it could literally tear him in half, and he vastly prefers his boyfriend intact.

“Carlos,” he tries, one last time. “I’m going to save you. I don’t know how yet, but I will. I would do anything for you. I would die for you.” 

He has a glimpse of Carlos just before the other man flees the room. He could have sworn he saw tears. Carlos’s voice seems to detach and hover, separate from his presence, a lapse in time so that when Cecil hears, “That is sub-optimal,” Carlos is already gone.


	16. Rites of Passage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Step 1: Invoke ancient and inscrutable deities. Step 2: Stare fixedly ahead into the distance. Step 3: Quote from people smarter than you, or at least people who have been published. This is how to lead a guerilla army.

Tamika’s Book Club gathers in a tent that Deanna raided from her parents’ basement while they wait for the sun to set. Tamika herself isn’t convinced that the sun ever sets on Desert Bluffs, though the quality of its light shifts and ebbs, as if to remind those beneath it that time is passing, time is passing faster than you’d hoped it would, faster than you can even comprehend, and you will never get as much done during the day as you should. She waits, prays even, for darkness. Night is for stealth and secrets. It is for cowering beneath a bedspread with a flashlight on and a non-municipally-approved novel propped against a pillow. It is humanity’s last bulwark against productivity. No wonder Desert Bluffs has abolished it. 

The tent leaks sand and heat from the mesa, and Tamika has to keep rubbing at her eyes to keep the grit from irritating them. But not too often. Enough grit on her face, and maybe it won’t be obvious that she’s been crying. Mostly, she sits very still, her knees hugged to her chest and her gaze focused on the red dust beneath her sneakers. 

No one else knows how to talk to her, or even what’s turned their fearless general into a fragile shell, so they listen to Old Woman Josie’s radio in the hope that it will reveal some sort of crucial intelligence that will set their course. The portal has dumped them just outside of Desert Bluffs (“Just as well,” Ahmed says, “they’d probably shoot us on sight otherwise”) and the reception is terrible. The stations that they can hear clearly range from the audio feed of a drone surveillance program in Abdu Resaba, ominous chanting, and New Country with no commercial breaks. Once, Deanna thinks she finds Kevin’s show, before Tamika points out that it’s the wrong time of day for it and the voice has a faintly Caribbean accent. And then: 

 _“The best afternoon of your life was August 23, 1985. You lay on your back in the middle of a wheat field. The sun was warm on your skin, and the sky was clear and blue and there were two clouds, one of which was shaped like a tapir. You were pleased that you thought of a tapir when anyone else would have seen a horse, and you smiled at nothing in particular.”_  

Tamika sits up, interested at last. “That’s Intern Maureen.” 

Deanna fiddles with the tuner; Tamika has to stop her before she loses the station altogether. There’s static, but she’s certain about what she’s hearing.

_“When your mother complains of insomnia, it is because she lies awake at night and dreams of opening her mouth, wider and wider, until she can devour you whole.”_

“That means the station’s broken away from the consolidated broadcast network, doesn’t it?” Deanna grips her arm in anticipation, and Tamika can’t blame her. If Night Vale has reclaimed the station, maybe the war has been won before it even began. Maybe Carlos’s urgent warning had been a massive overreaction, and they were safe, and there was no reason for them to go to Desert Bluffs at all.

“Or Maureen’s working for StrexCorp,” Tamika says. “Or whatever StrexCorp were doing back home was only part of it. I think we need to find out what’s going on.”

On the radio, Maureen says, _“A reminder: The portal only opens one way.”_ A brief pause, then: _“This message brought to you by Applebee’s. Applebee’s: It’s a whole new neighborhood.”_ She moves on to the community calendar. In the orange glow of sunlight through the tent canvas, the four teenagers exchange unhappy glances. 

“Is that true?” Ahmed asks. “About the portal?” 

“There’s no such thing as truth in advertising,” Tamika replies. “Besides, we can’t worry about that now; if we can’t stop whatever StrexCorp has planned, there won’t be a home to go back to.”

[The weather,](http://darkdarkdark.bandcamp.com/track/patsy-cline) filtered through a thick cloud of white noise, is languid and melancholy, a stark contrast to the hot sand and brilliant sky. Tamika emerges from the tent and stands on the flat plain overlooking the city, binoculars in hand. Megan follows her out, and wishes she could feel comforted by the other girl’s presence. Instead, she feels nothing. 

She sits down in the dust, twisting between her fingertips the blades of grass that cling to gaps in the rock face. She feels a kinship with it, a stunted, dry survivor of the desert, tries to take courage from its resilience. She tugs the little velvet bag of bloodstones from her backpack and places them in a circle around herself. Liquid is scarce in the desert, so she hopes the stones appreciate her offering.

The jolt from this reality to a markedly altered one is unlike anything she’s ever felt from her own bloodstones (to be honest, most of her rituals have heretofore been about appeasing her family and/or irritating StrexCorp; the fact that one might actually work comes a bit of a shock). She is flying, over the desert highway, towards the skyline. She sees the stadium, followed by one strip mall after the next. Desert Bluffs City Hall has been torn down and replaced by a second Chick-fil-A. Past it, the outline of the radio station looms against the blazing sky.

There’s a good chance, given the hours Kevin seems to keep, that he’s there now. Armed with an impressive body of classic literature and with Megan on their side, Tamika thinks they might have a chance of physically overpowering him. And StrexCorp knew to go after Cecil first; it’s likely enough that Kevin is just as valuable to them.

 _And then what?_ She’s always been one step ahead of her enemies, but that was on her own ground, with a proper army. This is spycraft. No, it’s guerrilla warfare.

At the base of a ravine, she can see trucks moving in and out of a large, flat complex, and she’s willing to bet that—based on what she’d gleaned from Kevin’s show—that’s the distribution center that houses StrexCorp’s head office. There’s a lot of activity going on, at any rate. Some of the trucks drive in along Highway 800, and pass through a weighing station just below where her physical body is sitting. 

Tamika opens her eyes. Megan is shaking her by the shoulders, making a soft, worried grunting noise. On the radio, Maureen is interviewing Dana, who exhorts listeners to follow Hiram McDaniels’s lead ( _“an upstanding citizen, but you still don’t get to be mayor”_ ) and put businesses suspected of being fronts for StrexCorp to the torch ( _“or, I guess, breathe on them, if you happen to breathe fire—at any rate, Night Vale is counting on you to do your civic duty!”_ ). 

With more conviction than she feels, Tamika declares, “We have a target.”

 

* * *

 

Carlos’s eyes are burning as he checks, then rechecks, the latest readings from the Subtle Bomb. Time progresses in a predictable manner in Desert Bluffs—beyond the occasional deletion of Mondays—and he’s well aware that he’s been awake for 76 hours, that he should feel tired, that even if his consciousness can go indefinitely without resetting, the rest of his body has not yet caught up. The human body is a delicate ecosystem, and REM sleep serves a crucial purpose within it. He is falling apart, his molecules stripped of their bonds, losing himself to disassociation. When he looks in the mirror (he tries not to look in the mirror; there’s all the blood streaked across it, for one, not to mention the knowledge that someone is looking back at him) his reflection is less solid than it should be. 

The weapon is perfect. His calculations are perfect. But it doesn’t fire, and it is growing harder and harder for Carlos to avoid thinking about why that is.

Aviva doesn’t understand. She wonders out loud, and Carlos tunes her out. It’s because she isn’t from Night Vale, he thinks. He isn’t either, but he’s lived there long enough to understand—grudging comprehension, but comprehension nevertheless—that it’s not the science. It’s taken him far too long to understand that it’s never just the science.

Any number of forbidden thoughts jockey for control. He hears the Bomb, its emerging sentience realer than anything that passes for the concrete in his dreary, sleepless days, ask him what he’s waiting for.

 _Reprieve,_ he thinks. _Forgiveness._ Which is preemptive. He hasn’t, as of yet, done anything that requires forgiveness beyond betraying Cecil, which is unforgivable.

“Are you sure?” Aviva asks him, for the third time, and now he has to not think about her plans, her ambitions, how she’s methodically designed the casing to fit into a StrexCorp transport truck and carried away from Desert Bluffs to be unleashed on an unsuspecting world.

He thinks about Hiroshima instead, of shadows burned into walls, and the Subtle Bomb assures him that its love is more powerful than even this.

But she didn’t get to be chief mechanical engineer at StrexCorp’s Desert Bluffs facility by being oblivious. “You’re hiding something. Not just—”

“Don’t.”

An unspoken gulf lies between them. Not just Cecil, who will die, or worse, if Carlos doesn’t complete his work; not just Night Vale, which ravaged him and rejected him and loved him more than he ever deserved, and now lies raw and vulnerable, a baby bird fallen from the nest, between his palms. Not even just the secrets his colleague—and she has become that, his one unlikely confidante in this cold, cruel city—has forced him to keep. No, there is one more thought he can’t bear to think, lest he become, after all this, nothing more than a destroyer of worlds.

“Carlos, if you know something, you should tell me.” Aviva’s tone is measured, reasonable. _Carlos, you can’t win this. You can only save yourself._

 _I know that,_ he thinks. _I’ve always known that._

“We can keep troubleshooting.” He knows he’s being evasive. He can feel the relic of the Smiling God pacing in its cage, stretching its growing limbs, pushing into the membrane between the theological and the material. He can sense its dreams of a kinder, more loving world as they bulge and expand in the vacuum where he no longer keeps any of his own.

They’re so close. He knows what it wants.

“There’s no need to be stubborn. Science will progress whether you’re standing in its way or not.”

He shakes his head. “You sound like a StrexCorp exec.”

“I _am_ a StrexCorp exec,” she says. “And you need to tell me what I’m missing.”

 _Three-point-one-four-one-five-nine-two-six…_ he thinks, and when he’s gotten to a thousand digits without anything that he can throw out to stall her springing to mind, he runs through each of Gödel’s incompleteness theorems in a last-ditch attempt to keep a parade of errant thoughts from reaching the device in his skull. _Devotion. Belief._

_Sacrifice._

“Carlos?”

He hisses, desperately: “I am trying to save your life.” They could run for it, escape with or without the weapon—she might be willing to leave it behind, she could hold Lauren and her guards off while he finds Cecil—but the door is already opening.

“Blood,” Lauren answers, and too late, Carlos sees the gleam of metal in her hand.

Carlos can’t move fast enough to stop the blade’s descent, any more than he could stop himself from telepathically broadcasting everything StrexCorp needed to know to complete his work for him. Arterial red, brighter than the dry rust stain that coats the walls, sprays across Aviva’s lab coat, over Carlos’s arms and face, is sucked greedily through the openings in the casing. 

The typical blood volume of an adult human body is five liters. Hypovolemic shock occurs with the loss of as little as one liter. But in the end, it isn’t about science at all. 

“It’s always blood,” Lauren says, and within the Subtle Bomb’s targeting mechanism, the Smiling God’s great yellow eye opens.


	17. Duck and Cover

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tamika makes a few discoveries. Carlos makes a leap of faith.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh myyyy that last episode made me happy. But it does look as though the central premise of this fic will be Jossed before I can finish it, so let's just go with "canon divergence after Monolith" and hope for the best, shall we?

Tamika crouches beneath a hot plastic tarp, her back pressed uncomfortably into the wheel well of a flatbed truck. There’s a scrape in her jeans above the ankle, not deep enough to have broken skin, and she plays absentmindedly with the torn flaps of denim as the vehicle rolls over the tarmac. Megan is squished up against her, bent nearly in half and still catching her breath in heavy wheezes. They’d agreed to divide into teams and Tamika wants to keep an eye on the younger girl. Deanna and Ahmed are several trucks behind them, assuming they didn’t have even worse luck with catching their vehicle as it rolled through the weighing station. 

The others are probably grateful for the reprieve, as the trucks carry their boxes of cargo—contents unknown, but Tamika thinks it smells a lot like rotting meat being slowly and steadily heated by sunlight through plastic—along Highway 800, but Tamika herself is as cheerful as a Cormac McCarthy novel. The ambush, in which she’d leapt into the back of the truck just after Megan— just as the wheels had started rolling—that blind moment of panic in the face of near-death, was the closest to an emotion she’d felt since catching a glimpse of what was under the hooded figure’s hood. Now that the moment has passed, there’s nothing to do but sit, and wait, and feel nothing beyond a dull awareness of the inevitable entropy of the universe.

It goes on for much longer than it should. Much, much longer than the highway looked when she was floating above it. Maybe they’re not even headed to Desert Bluffs. Maybe they’ve jumped on the one truck that isn’t—

There’s the sound of metal grinding on metal. Tamika reaches for her slingshot as the truck rolls to a stop. She darts behind a crate before the tarp flies up and the fluorescent lights in the receiving area’s ceiling glare down on them. She takes aim at the closest man. 

Megan springs to her feet and smacks the man across the face, knocking him into the opposite wall. His compatriot comes running. Megan lifts him by the throat and smashes him into the boxes. Another truck is already at the garage door; Tamika motions wildly to her friend, and the two girls take cover behind a forklift.

“Go,” Megan says. “I stay here. For the others.”

Tamika blinks. She almost asks if Megan can handle herself; then she looks at the two unconscious truckers by the back of the vehicle and thinks, no, Megan can totally handle herself. Tamika’s the one who doesn’t want to split the party. She doesn’t want to be alone. 

“Text me if you run into trouble,” she sighs.

Megan nods and squeezes her shoulder with the hand that actually is Megan. Slingshot at the ready, Tamika slides through the door and into the building.

Once inside, of course, she has no idea where to go. A maze of hallways, dripping with blood, indistinguishable except for an ever-changing series of motivational posters and exultations to the Smiling God ( _“Strex: Become your perfect self!” “Our ideas, like orange-plants, spread out in proportion to the size of the box which imprisons the roots!”_ and, of course, the ubiquitous, _“Hang in there!”_ )

She turns right at, _“When the going gets tough, keep going,”_ and finds a storage locker. An echo of the sixth sense she associates with Josie’s bloodstones compels her to pick the lock. Behind the metal cover are racks and racks of machine guns, tear gas canisters, live ammunition, rubber ammunition, sentient and squeaking ammunition. She closes it quickly, fleeing before she remembers to lock it.

StrexCorp’s invasion is not just about a handful of businesses; it’s more than their hijacking of the radio signal. They’re preparing for open war. Which doesn’t make sense—what’s even a roomful of guns compared to a fire-breathing dragon and a heavily armed Secret Police?—but she has to admit it looks impressive. And StrexCorp’s security force is much more than she can fight on her own.

Tamika hears footsteps and runs for the stairwell, sneakers clamoring on the steel-grated floor. It’s hopeless. StrexCorp has an army; she has three friends and a slingshot. All of the words in the world, no matter how well chosen, can’t defend her town. She darts down another featureless crimson hallway. 

So much blood. And teeth, and hair, and soft organs. Were it not for the truckers, and the footsteps that echo ever closer to her, she’d think that everyone who ever lived in Desert Bluffs was already splattered over its walls.

As if to rebuke her, at the end of the corridor, someone screams.

Several years in the Girl Scouts taught her that you should generally run in the opposite direction of the screaming, but she’s done a lot of independent reading since then and there’s an entire genre of high fantasy novels and the chivalric romance tradition arguing otherwise. Which is why, slingshot held before her like a talisman, she kicks open the door, knocks out the lab technician standing over the bed, and finds herself face to face with Cecil Palmer.

 

* * *

 

The laboratory is suffused with a warm, golden light. Carlos recoils from it, stumbling backwards from the targeting mechanism with his arm thrown across his face. He drops behind the particle accelerator, belatedly remembers that it’s probably the worst place to hide, and scrambles to the opposite side of the room behind the lead-lined curtains. 

He can see the tips of Lauren’s high-heeled shoes, picking through the pulped spread of tissue on the floor as she examines the weapon. Past her, Aviva lies with one hand resting against the Subtle Bomb’s casing as if taking its pulse, her throat open in a thick crimson line and her eyes staring sightlessly towards him. Carlos cringes and huddles into a ball.

This is about when his brain fires off with a chorus of “Bert the Turtle.” He goes with it. As far as he can tell, though it’s ceased to make any difference, he’s still transmitting every one of his conscious thoughts. _Duck! And cover. Duck! And cover. Enjoy the earworm, eavesdropping shitheads._

The weapon stirs.

Light dances over his bare skin, across the prickly growth of stubble on his scalp. He is filled with the machine’s infinite, all-encompassing love. It bleeds in through his eyes and mouth, pools low in his belly. He is wrapped in its warmth, illuminated from his very core. 

He is loved _._ He no longer needs to pick the fabric of reality apart with his instruments and measurements to extract its answers. He no longer needs to fight for recognition, debase the great quest for knowledge in pursuit of something as trivial as grant money. 

He has the answers. He has more than that. He has _acceptance._

All he needs to do is submit. 

Which is when he remembers that, before it was even operational, the Subtle Bomb melted the neural synapses of half of Aviva’s team when they came too close to it. The weapon still requires a non-believer to operate its targeting mechanism.

His hands, clutching the tails of his lab coat, are shining; he can see the veins and bones and sinew beneath the translucent gold of his skin. Slowly, he feels a sense of calm wash over him. It’s all incredibly beautiful.

He doesn’t want to be part of StrexCorp’s God-happy grinning hordes, nor does he want his grey matter fused to the interior of his skull, which, at this range, is very much within the scope of possible outcomes. But without him—specifically, without his materialist outlook and lack of religious zealotry—there is no one in Desert Bluffs who can possibly aim this monstrosity at Night Vale with any accuracy. And he has one last means of removing himself from the equation.

There’s bliss in surrender, peace, even. He wishes he could tell Cecil—who will never know what happened to him–that it hadn’t all been for nothing. Still, for the last two years of his life, when faced with the inexplicable and monstrous, he’s relied primarily on asking himself the question, “What Would Cecil Palmer Do?” and Carlos is definitely, absolutely, mostly sure of what Cecil would do right now.

_I’m sorry,_ he thinks, then, more sentimentally than he’s accustomed to, _I’ve always been terrible at people but I really do love you._  

Carlos stands up. He raises his arms, which is a pointless gesture, but seems appropriate, and steps out from behind the curtain.

_Look at me. I’m being brave and self-sacrificing._ He snorts derisively. He’s no hero; the best he can do is to get himself killed so that he doesn’t take anyone else down with him. 

The Smiling God’s yellow eye looks past Lauren standing with her hands on her hips, past Aviva’s crumpled, exsanguinated corpse. He can feel the burn of its gaze, laser-focused on him, as though he’s the only sentient entity in the universe whose existence is more meaningful than a mere random collision of molecules. 

“I’m ready.” 

Is there some kind of conversion ritual? There’s nearly always a conversion ritual. _I accept the Smiling God as my Lord and Savior, ph'nglui mglw'nafh StrexCorp R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn, mass into energy , 2.8x10 27 atoms of stardust into the form and shape of human lives, into decay and rich earth, into worms,_ and he’s consumed by divinity, aware of every speck of dust, of the names once given to the stains on the walls, joined with every spark of consciousness in every one of the minds that the Smiling God has claimed as His own.

For a brief, shining moment, Carlos is entirely fulfilled.

Just like that, he’s caught in arms that are neither long nor short, held tightly against a familiar chest as he’s dragged out of the room. The light is gone—its promise and allure paused, at least, behind a reinforced door—and he remembers that, of all the mysteries of the universe, he has loved this one the most. 

“Cecil,” he whispers, dizzy and breathless, turning to face him. “Oh God, I missed you so much, how did you even—”

The man facing him is neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin. His skin is medium brown. He has Cecil’s prominent nose and full lips, his mop of frizzy black hair.

The holes where his eyes should be extend deeper than back of his skull, twin portals into the Void, exhaling lazy wisps of smoke. 

He frees an arm and drags his finger—the skin smooth and unbroken, never used for arcane and probably pointless blood rituals—over Carlos’s jaw. 

“Gosh,” Kevin says, his voice the shallow dregs that remain after Cecil’s oceans have boiled over. “That is just so _super sweet,_ Carlos.” He leans in close, as if to kiss him, close enough that Carlos can smell the blood—Cecil’s blood, oh _fucking Christ—_ on his sharp teeth. He whispers, “We can still hear your thoughts.”

As loudly and vindictively as he can, Carlos thinks that Kevin is an asshole.

“We’ll just have to agree to disagree on that one,” Kevin chirps. “But you don’t get to die. Not when we need you so much! We’re going to have fun together, you and I, for a very, very long—” 

His mental calculation is swift. Kevin looks unarmed—to the extent that he ever is, with those teeth of his. He has Cecil’s build: shorter and stockier than Carlos, lower center of gravity, no doubt as unenthusiastic about morning runs as Cecil is. He knows that body intimately, knows how it moves and pivots, where it places its weight. Carlos flashes him a crooked smile that he desperately hopes is distracting, shifts to a better angle, knees Kevin in the balls, and runs like hell.


	18. Wallpaper

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil and Carlos reunite, so at least there's that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Anonymous scans the cluster of tags and warnings attached to this story. 
> 
> Anonymous wonders if they have included enough warnings. Anonymous hopes so. 
> 
> Nevertheless, they would like to point out that this is one of the chapters where the warnings become relevant.

Cecil blinks—to the extent that he can, with one eye half swollen and the other two myopic and focused elsewhere, respectively—and strains to sit up. “Tamika?” 

Tamika rushes to his side. He’s strapped to the bed with a complex configuration of straps and metal cuffs. She wonders what StrexCorp is afraid of. She frees one hand, letting him disconnect various tubes and IV lines while she frantically works to unfasten the rest of the restraints, and then she’s wrapped up in a warm tangle of arms and five and a half tentacles, Cecil’s face buried against the top of her head. “Tamika, you brave, clever girl, what are you doing here?” 

She answers him with a choked sob. If her capacity to feel safe and comforted hadn’t been brutally flensed from her when she crossed through the portal, she’d feel it now, in this strange, blood-soaked place. Cecil holds her and murmurs, “It’s okay to cry, I am crying too, the transitory nature of existence is only made bearable by the temporary alignment of your life’s trajectory with someone else’s,” and for a moment the crushing grief that she’s carried with her since the Dog Park abates enough to be bearable.

She leans against him and lets him talk. The broken thing inside her isn’t fixed, not exactly, but it hurts less when she hears the soft, familiar cadence of his voice. She clutches him tightly—too tightly; he yelps and she lets go—sniffling into his shoulder.

“Carlos warned us.” Tamika pulls away, fighting every instinct that tells her as long as he’s hugging her, they’re both okay, and accordingly she should keep hugging him forever. She tries to critically assess the situation. He’s been badly beaten, and _gods,_ are those bite marks? He shivers beneath a thin hospital gown that’s seen better days. The technician on the floor is groaning. She kicks him, and he stops. “He got a message through on the radio.”

Cecil looks crestfallen. Wherever Carlos is now, it can’t be good news. He reaches out and wipes her tears away with his thumbs. “What did he say?”

“That StrexCorp is coming and we should evacuate the town.”

“Did you?” She shakes her head. “Oh. Oh. That would have been a good idea.”

“Cecil?”

“We need to go.” He swings his legs off the bed, stands—and then immediately staggers into her, clutching at his midsection. She circles an arm around his waist. He’s heavier than he looks, and not very stable. Several of his tentacles snake out to grip the side of the gurney; another winds around a scalpel. “We need to go,” he says, quieter this time, as if he’s trying to convince himself. “They have Carlos working on a doomsday device and he’s mind-controlled but he’s fighting it but I think he’s losing that fight, and—” He sags into her, and she glances down at his bare feet, bruised and slashed to ribbons and planted in the middle of what she’s afraid is someone’s small intestine, which can’t be hygienic.

“Can you even walk?”

He takes a shaky step forward, grimacing in pain. “It’s Carlos. I pretty much have to.” He flails for the wall, fingernails clawing into the red-splashed stucco, and, holding himself up between it and Tamika, manages to make his way to the door.

They’re not going to make it, she thinks. However tenacious he is, there’s muscle atrophy, there’s severe bruising at best and internal bleeding at worse, and he can’t even see. She can’t fire her slingshot and keep him standing at the same time. And she can’t leave him to go find Carlos; the StrexCorp guards will be on him in a minute.

“Hold on.” She digs out her phone and texts Megan. Cecil’s still edging against the wall—she’s certain he’d crawl if he had to, even if he had no idea where he was going and all of his arms and legs were broken—at the very least, they need backup.

“He’s not far,” Cecil tells her, and that makes it worse. She can only fail him, and Night Vale. She has no plan. Cecil has no plan and potentially life-threatening injuries. If she could get him out of Desert Bluffs the rest would fall into place—he could rally the town to arms where she couldn’t, pull strings with Mayor Cardinal and the Sheriff’s Secret Police and convince someone else, someone grown-up and powerful, to do something—but Tamika didn’t survive to age 14 by being oblivious, and she knows there’s no way Cecil is going to leave the complex without Carlos.

She wonders, wistfully, what it’s like to love someone that much, but there’s no time for sentiment, and besides, she can’t imagine ever being able to glue the shattered porcelain shards of her psyche back together enough to let another person get close to her.

“This way.” He’s probably making it up, but maybe not; there’s a high correlation between things that he claims are true and things that, for all practical purposes, ultimately are. He winces with each step, biting back a grunt of pain. _Megan, where’s Megan, where the hell is everyone else?_

There are footsteps coming towards them, each slap of sole against the floor’s squishy surface faster as it approaches.

Her memory flashes to the guns in the storage locker. If not her presence, then her militia’s presence, or Cecil’s absence, must have drawn attention by now. StrexCorp’s security, armed to the teeth, will be hunting them. She pulls Cecil into a blind corridor and digs _The Eyre Affair_ —meta literature is unpredictable as ammunition, but if she’s only got one shot against an army, she needs to make it count—out of her backpack. She pulls the slingshot’s strap backwards and waits for them to come around the corner.

“Tamika, wait.” Cecil is squinting at something at the end of the hallway. There’s a man running towards them in a rust-spattered yellow lab coat.

It’s not StrexCorp’s security. It’s Carlos.

 

* * *

 

 

Carlos thinks he’s hallucinating at first. Little Tamika Flynn, scowling and aiming a postmodern novel at his head. Prolonged sleep deprivation, did they account for diminished cognitive function, he should have asked— 

“Carlos!”

Cecil tackles him—it’s really Cecil this time; he knows because neither his delusions nor Kevin bleed and sob all over him—and it’s all he can do not to just collapse in his arms. Given that Cecil is out of his restraints, he’s probably not imaging Tamika either. Typical Night Vale: You risk your life and sanity sending out a coded distress signal and they send a precociously erudite child soldier to save the day. It’s not exactly the rescue mission he was hoping for, but far be it from him to complain.

“Run!” he hisses, “You both need to get out of here.”

Tamika nods eagerly. “Yeah, that’s basically the plan, genius. C’mon.”

Cecil’s draped over him, running his thumbs over Carlos’s temples, coiling tentacles around his arms and waist, breath ragged against his collarbone. Hesitantly, he pets Cecil’s hair, and that’s already more contact than he should have. The device growls a warning into his skull: dangerous levels of cognitive dissonance incoming. There’s a tentacle reaching for his hand, snaking around his wrist, and he knows if he clasps it, no force known to physics will compel him to let go, even if the electric shock lobotomizes him.

“You need to go _without me_ ,” he grits out, tugging his hand away.

Cecil reaches around to the back of his head. “He’s being mind-controlled.” His voice quavering—Carlos hates them, hates himself most of all, for making Cecil’s voice quaver, for making him question just how deeply Carlos loves him, how fucking _important_ he is—he adds, “I’m right, aren’t I? That’s why…”

There’s no time. Security—or worse, Kevin—will be here any second. “Not mind-controlled,” Carlos says quickly. “My neural transmissions are being uploaded to a StrexCorp monitoring system. They can observe and respond, but not alter. Cecil, they could never change—” Cecil’s hair tickles his neck as he nuzzles closer. Tamika is fidgeting with her slingshot again. Neither of them does the sensible thing, which is to run as far away from Carlos as possible. “You are both in grave danger,” Carlos tries again. “They can feel everything I’m feeling, see everything I see. Like, for example, where you are _right now_.”

“Oh,” Cecil says. He sounds surprised. Then, of all absurdities, he laughs, his lovely, euphonious laugh that, under any other circumstance, would have Carlos weak in the knees. “You ridiculous man. Close your eyes.”

They’re supposed to be running away, it’s all for nothing if he gets Cecil captured again, but he can’t _not_ ; he shuts his eyes and Cecil’s clinging to him, kissing him, and neither of them have exactly had regular access to showers or oral hygiene or non-viscera-soaked living environments lately but it doesn’t matter, not with Cecil’s lips warm against his own and his voice purring in Carlos’s ear. Carlos needs him like oxygen, positive he’ll drown if he’s not gasping into Cecil’s mouth. He aches for every micron of Cecil’s scarred skin. The device is not best pleased; Carlos tells it to go fuck itself. He’s needed this for so long, is lost to the giddy realization that Cecil forgives him, still loves him despite everything he’s done.

“I love your dazzling intellect _so much_ ,” Cecil murmurs. “But could you, like, try not thinking for a second?” His fingers rub circles into Carlos’s stubbly head, which, fleeing for his life or not, is pretty much the _best thing._ “So busy in here.”

The device’s hum builds to a keening whine, threatening to drill through his brain. “Cecil, I don’t think—”

“Shh. That’s kinda the entire _point_.” Cecil’s tongue flicks against his earlobe, and then he whispers, “You are adrift in the infinite void, tethered to cold rock on an inconceivably temporary basis by forces of physics that will be your ultimate undoing, you are an ephemeral flicker in an endless night and nothing you have ever felt or thought will rescue you from inevitable oblivion. _Think of nothing.”_ The scream in his head ebbs. He’s aware, first, of his own body, the butterfly-flutter in his stomach and the hot air that brushes over his cheek, and then he’s not aware of much at all. He is temporally and spatially disoriented, flooded with sensation that engulfs rational thought, until nothing remains but the Voice and the incredibly surreal experience of literally being kissed senseless.

There are two sets of arms, and some number between one and 5.5 of tentacles, around him, and he’s being dragged to places unknown, and thus, places temporarily unthinkable. He doesn’t pay attention to which corridors they’re turning on, which isn’t hard, since all he can think about at the moment is that he was holding Cecil just a moment ago and wishes he still was and now he has a nervous erection that’s making running blind even more difficult and embarrassing, before there’s yet another pair of hands pulling him in another direction and the sound of a door opening and closing. Tamika says, “Okay, you can open your eyes now.”

He’s in a darkened room, which is a first in a long time, darkness having been relegated to the great list of things, like hope and joy and sterile laboratory equipment, of which Carlos has started to doubt the existence. But the fluorescent bulb has been ripped right out of the ceiling of what looks to be a supply closet of some description. Even that’s probably a more specific description than he should be thinking; he concentrates instead on Cecil, slumped into his side.

It takes his eyes a moment to adjust. Cecil’s wrapped around him in a manner physically impossible with standard human anatomy. He whimpers in pain, and Carlos eases them both to the floor and shifts him so that he’s more or less in Carlos’s lap. Tamika pats his arm, then glances worriedly up at three newcomers who are crowded into the closet with them—a boy and a girl that must belong to her militia, and a hulking bald man with faded flower tattoos.

The bald man smiles as though he’s been informed in only very vague terms of what a smile is and that they are typically comprised of teeth. “Hi Cecil.” Cecil gives him a tired little wave and drops his head against Carlos’s chest.

“Lean forward,” the man tells him in a heavy Russian accent. Carlos does, and he feels large, stubby fingers fiddling with the device and he has a brief second of worrying if this guy knows what he’s doing or whether he’s going to electrocute all of them before a bolt of indescribably intense pain jerks through his head and neck. Carlos would scream, except there’s a tentacle in his mouth muffling the sound; his body twitches and seizes. For a few seconds, all he can see are stars dancing in front of his vision. It clears. He breathes through the pain. It passes, more or less. He’s at last completely alone in his mind.

“Megan Wallaby,” Tamika introduces the man. Or, well, little girl. Carlos isn’t overly invested in the gender or age specifics of his liberator. “She’s great with computers and—” There’s a sound of metal grinding and cracking under a massive boot, a flash of sparks in the darkness. “—destroying computers as well, I guess. And this is Deanna and Ahmed.”

Carlos touches his face. There are tears streaming down his cheeks. He wipes his eyes against his shoulder and looks down at Cecil, now that he can freely allow his brain to acknowledge him. He’s immediately overwhelmed with far more emotions than he can process, not the least of which is how, even broken and exhausted, Cecil is still the most beautiful thing in the entire world. He wriggles out of his lab coat and drapes it over Cecil’s shoulders, rewarded for the effort by a happy little shiver, as if all his suffering could just be whisked away by that one, small gesture.

How could he have forgotten what it felt like to be loved this much? Carlos isn’t sure how he’d survived a day, let alone the endless stretch of time that had passed in the desert, without Cecil. Cecil fumbles for his hand and holds it against his chest; Carlos can feel his too-rapid heart pounding through the thin fabric of the hospital gown, and _God,_ if they could only stay like this, everything would be perfect.

Tamika shoves his arm. “How do we get out of here?”

Carlos remembers that, oh yes, imminent danger. “Aviva said—” Aviva, who is lying dead in a pool of her own blood, which will be a kinder fate than the one awaiting them if he doesn’t do something soon. “—there’s a wing under renovation. We can get to the car park through it. I think I know the way.” If they can just get to the parking lot, into a car, if they can just drive and drive, they’ll be safe.

The girl’s eyes narrow. “And the weapon?”

“We have time.” Carlos adds, “Well, to the extent that anyone can _possess_ time, as time is an intangible and doesn’t even function properly half the—” Tamika huffs. Carlos clears his throat. “Sorry. The Smiling God’s believers can’t get near it; they need me to operate it. We can escape and inform the Night Vale authorities before StrexCorp recruits another scientist.”

To, admittedly, his surprise, Tamika is nodding. “That’s a plan. Well, most of a plan. Okay.” She glances around in a pretense of consensus decision-making before reverting to military general mode. “People, we are _under attack_. What remains of our narrow and heavily curtailed freedom depends on whether or not one or more of us make it out of Desert Bluffs alive. We are, right now, the only people who can shove our boots right up StrexCorp’s profit margin. Slingshots at the ready, comrades! Our words are our weapons!”

If there’s a weariness in her that he doesn’t remember being there before, if she stands with somewhat less energy than a teenager should possess, if there is something nagging at the back of his mind that he can’t help but worry he’s overlooked, he can attribute it to fatigue on both their parts, and the severity of the stakes.

He slides one arm under Cecil’s neck and the other under his knees and lifts him. It’s harder than it looks in the movies, but Cecil lifts his head and, of all things, bats his eyelashes at Carlos. “Just so you know, this is _totally_ hot.” The warm burst of affection that ripples through Carlos is more than enough to carry them both through.

Tamika goes first, with Carlos staggering behind her, wracking his memory for which functional, impersonal corridor led where. He hears distant shouts—security is looking for them, tearing the complex apart. He’s about to concede that he’s led them the wrong way when he sees exposed drywall and wall studs, a steel door left ajar, and salvation.

“Ohpleaseohpleaseohplease,” Ahmed mutters.

Tamika peeks around the edge of the door and gives the all-clear signal. They creep inside, slide the door shut soundlessly behind them.

Carlos then remembers what people in Desert Bluffs mean when they say “renovations.”

The kids, used to violence and having seen what StrexCorp interior décor looks like, don’t seem fazed, but Cecil shudders and buries his face against Carlos’s neck. Carlos tells himself that this is no different than anything else he has witnessed here already. He lends the dripping gobbets of meat anatomical terminology. The glistening, reeking tube draped across the top of the wall like a morbid Christmas garland is jejunum. The floor and parts of the walls are lined with hypodermis, the yellow globules, adipose. The tar-blackened shape dangling from a basket of connective tissue is just a lung, although it’s the wrong way around.

It is not correct, or scientific, to place a value judgment on his observations. It is merely the human body, placed in an unconventional arrangement. He tightens his grip on Cecil and keeps moving. If he just keeps moving, through this endless chamber of horrors, there’s freedom on the other side.

One undifferentiated lump, its ribcage mostly exposed, twitches, gasps wordlessly. Carlos bites back a—completely manly, mind you—cry. Someone’s ripped out the man’s tongue and nailed it to his palm. What’s left of the lips move in silence: _Kill me. Kill me._

He can’t. He’s never killed anyone, unless you count the legions of tiny people he’s unwittingly stepped on, and that was an accident. He is not responsible for their lives or deaths. He is not responsible for his own life or death. No one actually holds that sort of power.

It begins as a susurrus, building to a low-pitched whine. Carlos doesn’t even realize what the sound is until the layers of agony become a chorus of shrieks, broken mouths and split tongues crying out through blood and vomit. Too late, he realizes that the renovations are _in progress_ , that not all of the human remains are entirely dead. Too late, he whispers, “Quiet, please be quiet,” but if they hear them, they, the dying, possess no residual solidarity with the living.

The footsteps are closer now. Much closer, in unison, one proud team, marching blindly towards greater market share. Tamika, grim and hollow-eyed, jerks her head at a partially built wall that might have enough concrete to shelter them. Without hesitation, he throws himself behind it, covering Cecil’s body with his own, and doesn’t notice that the kids haven’t followed until the shooting starts.

He doesn’t see much. He’s busy wrestling Cecil into submission. God knows what Cecil thinks he can do, but he’s struggling wildly. Weak as he is, he still has more limbs than Carlos does, and a combination of squirming tentacles and indefatigability frees him and sends Carlos sprawling on his ass, clawing after him.

Carlos scrambles to his feet and reaches the edge of the wall in just enough time to see the last StrexCorp guard splash Megan Wallaby’s brains across the wall, and Cecil plant the scalpel he’s been carrying in the back of the grinning bastard’s neck.

Cecil sways on his feet. Carlos catches him before he can fall.

Deanna and Ahmed are unmistakably dead, their small bodies lying amongst the larger bodies of the guards they’ve somehow killed. Carlos can’t process it. He recognizes, objectively, that children can and do die. Dead is one of the things that a child can be. Death is merely the point at which the expansive necrobiome supplants the original discrete biome, and it makes no distinction for age or innocence. But his mind won’t wrap around the fact that these children, who were vibrant and determined and brave only moments earlier, are lifeless and still on the plastic-draped floor.

Tamika Flynn crawls on her belly towards them, and Cecil pulls free of Carlos’s grasp to drop beside her and gather her in his arms. Carlos crouches beside them, his eye on the door, on the fallen guards’ weapons. For a handful of seconds, he tells himself that she doesn’t look that badly hurt, that maybe she’ll be fine, maybe that blood isn’t even hers, and then she shifts to look up at the two men and he can see the front of her t-shirt soaked in red.

Cecil tugs off the lab coat and tries to staunch the bleeding. Tamika coughs, more blood issuing from the side of her mouth. She moans. Manages, “…don’t.”

“No, no, you need to hold on, when you die it is a very long time from now, when you’ve done more and you’re sick of all the doing—” His voice cracks halfway through. “Tamika, you can’t die for me.”

“For Night Vale, then.”

“Not even for that.” He releases the pressure, gently smoothes a stray cornrow out of her face. “Oh, my dear, sweet, valiant girl. Stay. Just…”

She coughs again. “Cecil?”

“Quiet. Save your strength.”

“I need to tell you…” Tamika rasps. “I’ve been scared ever since I can remember.”

“I don’t believe that.” He’s crying; he doesn’t even make an attempt to hide it. Maybe it’s good, Carlos thinks, that she knows someone’s left to cry over her. “You’re the bravest person I’ve ever met.”

“Still,” Tamika says. “People were always disappearing, being culled…I never knew, when I woke up, whether I would survive the day. When you’re a kid—do you even remember being a kid?”

Cecil shakes his head. “Not really.”

“It’s—it’s fucking terrifying, to be honest.” She wheezes; Carlos can hear the catches in her breath, the echo of a collapsed lung. He should do something, but there’s nothing that can be done, and they all know it. “But at night, I’d listen to your show. Your sign-off. That was how I knew.”

Cecil strokes her cheek. She smiles, sad and faint, her eyes gazing past him at the slow drip of pulverized flesh down the wall. Of all things, there’s a _mirror_ there, shattered by one of the gunshots, and Cecil tilts her face away from the shards of glass. “Don’t look. You don’t need to see that.”

“It’s okay,” Tamika says. “I’ve already seen. It’s just sound. It’s not scary. It’s strange, and it’s powerful, but every night, every night of my _entire life,_ it was there to remind me that I lived through another day.” Her small hand reaches for his and he clasps it, raises it to his face and sobs harder. “Fucking Spire, this is a shitty place to die.”

“Then don’t.” His voice is so small, as if he truly believed that a teenage girl bleeding out from multiple high-velocity gunshot wounds could simply _choose_ to live, because he’s begging her to. He probably does. Cecil believes a lot of ridiculous things. Maybe in Night Vale it wouldn’t even be so ridiculous; God knows Carlos has been witness to any number of miracles, his own resurrection among them.

Tamika is back to looking at the wall, her lips slightly curled upwards, as if let in on a secret joke. “Hey. Hey Cecil. This is a good last line. Oscar Wilde. Either this wallpaper goes or I do.”

“Please—” Cecil chokes. Tamika looks up at him. Some subtle understanding, beyond Carlos’s comprehension, floats between them. She squeezes his hand, and then her fingers go slack. “Goodnight, Tamika Flynn,” Cecil whispers at her glazed, staring eyes. “Goodnight.”


	19. Xa’ligha Ex Machina

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Faith, bloodstones, and wibbly wobbly timey wimey.

The room in the wing that is under renovations is very quiet. The shooting has ceased. The sound of books and machetes ripping through flesh has ceased. Even the screaming of the dying, the very sound that doomed them all, has—for no reason Carlos can fathom beyond dramatic irony—fallen silent at last.

All that remains is a sound that Carlos would quit all science forever to never hear again: Cecil, hunched over Tamika’s cooling corpse, weeping piteously. 

Carlos has never really lost anyone before. His mother died when he was too young to remember her, and since then, he’s never _had_ anyone to lose. Cecil’s different, Cecil’s known practically nothing _but_ loss, and thus the gap is unbridgeable.

He tries, nonetheless. He takes the shards of mirror and turns each one the other way. He strokes Cecil’s hair, kisses the tears on his cheeks and eyebrows, the bridge of his nose, rubs his back and makes comforting noises as best he knows how. This is what you do when your boyfriend is paralyzed with grief.

It is not, however, what you do when your boyfriend, not to mention yourself, is in imminent peril. “We need to go,” Carlos says, well before he probably should. “Cecil, Tamika wouldn’t want you to—” He has a strong sense that this is not the right thing to say, no matter how factual it might be.

“I am not,” Cecil says, “leaving her in Desert Bluffs to become one of their sick decorations.”

“Okay,” Carlos replies, though it’s really _not._ It’s the exact opposite of okay. “Except, I can’t carry you and her both, and you are still alive, so can I just get you out of here and I promise, I swear, Cecil, I will come back for her body, we’ll bury her in Night Vale, but sweetheart—” He’s never called Cecil by any term of endearment before—they’ve always struck him as so corny—but he looks desolate, huddled in a little ball with the girl’s body draped over his lap, his bare back showing through the opening in the hospital gown, his hands and arms red with her drying blood. “C’mon.” Carlos shifts Tamika so she’s lying on the floor, then covers her with the lab coat.

Cecil still won’t move. “Lauren,” he says dully. “Lauren can operate the machine.”

“What?” Lauren must be dead by now. She was right there with Carlos. He hadn’t bothered to check, but she’s Vice-President of the company, she’s their outgoing face; if anything, she should have been more affected by the sentient relic than Aviva’s team. 

“She doesn’t actually believe in the Smiling God.” 

“How do you even—” No, that is definitely the wrong question. Cecil doesn’t know what a cloud is made of and thinks that the moon will eventually give up and vanish if he yells enough dirty jokes at it, but it’s probably because his brain is full of information like _this_ instead. “Why is she so hell-bent on converting everyone to believing in something that she doesn’t believe in herself?”

“Uh.” Cecil looks sheepish. Carlos doesn’t press it.

“Point taken. Look, you’re hurt really badly. I don’t think we—that is, I’m not sure what it is we can do about it now.” Plan B, which was actually Plan A until Tamika and her friends showed up, is forming in his mind. He can still save Cecil’s life. This is all he can do. 

Carlos tries to lift him but he manages to wiggle free, his attention caught by movement on the floor. Megan is sprawled against the wall, half her skull disintegrated into bone fragments and lumps of grey matter, her long arms spread to either side of her.

Her left hand is twitching. 

_Oh sweet fucking Christ,_ Carlos thinks. _She’s still alive in there._  

Plan C. Find something sharp to— _ugh_ —cut off Megan’s hand, which is awful for her but better than being dead, _then_ run away. As he starts to rummage around, Cecil finally decides to move, crawling in painstaking increments across the floor to where Megan’s index finger points to a bloodied pink backpack. Carlos stops what he’s doing and sees Cecil pull a small velvet bag from somewhere inside it. 

Cecil’s ashen face lights up, and he kisses the hand. “Of course! Thank you, Megan! Thank you!” He pulls bloodstones out of the bag and arranges them in a circle around himself. Carlos can hear distant voices; probably, he thinks, a second wave of guards drawn in by the earlier gunfire. They have minutes; maybe not even that. 

“Cecil?” he tries. “What are you doing?”

Cecil looks up from the bloodstone circle. Twin rivulets of blood stream across his palms, feeding the stones. The indigo floaters ripple across the white sea of his third eye. 

“Praying,” Cecil says.

Carlos grimaces in frustration. He tugs the scalpel loose from the dead guard’s neck. It’ll have to do. “Tamika’s dead, and I have to perform an emergency amputation if we’re going to save Megan, and there are more guards coming. We can mourn later, but we have to go _now._ ” 

Cecil is briefly silent. Then: “I didn’t say I was praying for her.” 

Carlos has the blade to the inside of Megan’s elbow—there’s no doubt going to be infection, which means sawing off more of her arm once they get to safety and sterility, and he doesn’t want to cut into what’s actually Megan—and is about to slice when he hears boot steps outside. 

His eyes flicker to the exit. It suddenly seems very far away.

“Cecil, we need to—” 

This time, Cecil doesn’t respond immediately, lost in his weird ritual. He rises slowly. The air crackles around him, like static on an old TV set. His face is blank. 

“If this doesn’t work,” he says. “I expect a maximum of teeth-gnashing and garment-rending in my memory.” 

Possessed by a last burst of adrenaline, Cecil throws the steel door open and flings himself down the hallway at the two approaching guards. Carlos grabs one of the dead guards’ guns and bolts after him, just in time to see the eyeless drones raise their weapons and open fire.

Right before he hits the ground, Cecil blinks out of existence.

 

* * *

 

The Voice’s thoughts cannot be accurately translated into words you would understand. The Voice exists in dimensions far beyond your limited perception, thinks in fractal patterns of cosmic vibrations that emerged when the universe was young and will exist long after the sun has swallowed both the dark planet and your own. The Voice’s actions, in your dimension, through the various hosts it has inhabited since Night Vale’s founding, are indirect and impossible for you to perceive or comprehend. You shouldn’t try. The price for doing so is gibbering madness.

To paraphrase, then:

Long ago, the Voice knew a time traveler. There were many time travelers, before Night Vale banned the practice. This time traveler was the reason Night Vale banned the practice, a living embodiment of Why We Can’t Have Nice Things. He is long dead—mortals have but a brief lifespan, even if they choose not to live it out in sequence—but the bloodstones that carried him exactly 12 hours back in time on multiple occasions have outlived him, handed down to first his widow, then a girl warrior, until they passed into the possession of the Voice’s current body. 

The Voice quite agrees with the ban and with City Council’s reasoning. The Voice also understands that its current body is heavily damaged and inconvenient, and it could just as easily wake up, back home, in a better one. Maybe the one named Maureen. A younger, stronger body. But it has come to _like_ its host, and in particular the scientist it keeps around. It never had this much fun driving Leonard Burton. At the time of his death, Leonard Burton hadn’t gotten laid in three decades.

_Okay_ , _Palmer,_ the Voice says resignedly—still paraphrasing, of course— _just this once._

Milliseconds before impact, it extends a presence into your dimension and hurls Cecil 720 minutes backwards through time.

 

* * *

 

Carlos fires wildly at the oncoming guards. He knows absolutely nothing about weaponry besides what he’s seen in movies, but he has the advantage of cover, limited as it is, and having eyes. They keep smiling and shooting, even though Cecil’s sprawled out on the ground. Carlos’s bullets seem to just bounce right off their body armor.

Carlos waits behind the door until the guards are nearly on him, then swings it out at one guard, leaps out, and smashes the butt of his rifle into the other guard’s face. He can feel the cheekbone shatter into the empty cranial orbit and the man goes down. The first guard’s gun fires—Carlos feels something hit him in the back, and okay, wow, he’s actually been shot, which doesn’t seem like a thing that can happen—and as he turns, he sees a tentacle snake out around the man’s ankle and yank him down on the floor. Carlos raises the gun and hits him, over and over again, for Cecil and Tamika and Deanna and Ahmed and most of Megan’s body, until his face is a bloody pulp and Cecil’s groan from the floor reminds him of more pressing priorities.

Staggering, he drops to his knees beside Cecil, reaching to feel the wound in his back. It stings like hell, but there’s no blood.

Cecil raises his head, then pushes himself up with a combination of elbows and tentacles. 

“So,” Cecil says, as if he hasn’t just been shot multiple times at close range. “That was seriously badass.”

“How are you even alive?” If anything, there’s less blood on him than before. _Before what?_ Carlos’s brain nags. He can’t shake the feeling that something worse happened, just minutes ago. Cecil had been covered in blood, and it hadn’t been his own. He’d been drowning in it. 

“Like the NRA says,” Cecil tells him cheerfully. “We’re all immune to bullets. It’s a miracle.”

“Really?”

“No, not really.” He scoops a shell off the ground and places it in Carlos’s hand. It’s a rubber bullet—crowd control, not mass murder, that’s why he’s not bleeding and Cecil’s not torn to shreds. “I might have altered the timeline. Just a little. They had both kinds of bullets in their locker, and someone had left it open, so. I, er, switched the less-lethal type for the pretty-much-always lethal type.”

“You altered the _what?_ ”

“I may only be a humble community radio host possessed by a transdimensional being of arcane and terrifying power whose interests extend primarily to updating a small town on local events,” Cecil says. “But I am still possessed by a transdimensional being of arcane and terrifying power. Plus I was a Boy Scout. Like, give me some credit here.” He tries to stand, and gives up with a gasped, “Oh. Oww.” He slumps back against the wall. “I think you have to go be a hero now.”

“What?”

“Lauren…the bomb. Couldn’t find the off switch. Sorry.”

Realization dawns on him with a creeping horror. He thought he’d already made the choice. Night Vale or Cecil. Cecil or Night Vale. Minutes ago, he was certain he’d lost both. Now he is unwilling to relinquish either. 

“I am not leaving you here! I just—” He kneels in front of Cecil, entwining their fingers. “I just got you _back._ ”

Cecil swallows. Nods. “But you have to. You’ll be safe—the Book Club will be with you.” He glances at the open door. Ahmed and Deanna are standing in the doorframe, Megan towering behind them. They look fine—banged up in the attack and splattered by the blood of the smiling guards, but fine. Carlos blinks, one memory overlaid on top of another like a double exposure. Of course they’re fine. Why wouldn’t they be?

Tamika Flynn pushes past them to crouch by Cecil’s side. “Go on,” she says. “I’ll get him out.”

He doesn’t know why he’s so startled to see her. There’d been an exchange of fire—rubber bullets versus books—and, against everything Carlos knows about the laws of physics, the pen is apparently mightier than the sword. He supposes the laws of physics don’t entirely apply to carnivorous books excavated from the Night Vale Public Library.

They’re completely fine, as if nothing had ever—because it hasn’t.

“You’re _thinking_ again,” Cecil says, and even under the circumstances, Carlos can’t entirely suppress a giddy burst of affection towards him. “I love you, my darling, perfect Carlos, I love you so much, but you are the only one who can stop Lauren. Please. I’ll—I went _months,_ Carlos, I’ll be fine.”

Carlos reminds himself that, for all his childlike, trusting nature, his FCC-approved language, his truly atrocious sweater vest collection, Cecil has survived decades in a town where most don’t. Beneath the ebullient persona is a core of steel. Still, Carlos can’t shake the sense that something is wrong, something is _terribly_ wrong, that myriad realities are shifting and grinding like tectonic plates, the ground is unstable beneath his feet, but Cecil grabs his collar and brings his face close enough for a last kiss, and Tamika shouts, “Go! Now!” 

The Book Club behind him and a rifle swinging awkwardly from his shoulder, Carlos runs back down the corridor, in search of a god on a rampage.

 

* * *

 

Cecil watches Carlos flee. It’s only then that he allows himself to finally collapse, the various physical and mental traumas at long last, more than he can bear. 

It was just a little change, the smallest ripple in the ocean of time, but he’s seen something that he shouldn’t, violated not simply Night Valian law but something much greater, and he can’t help but think that there will be consequences. That he is experiencing those consequences right now. He feels pulled apart, stretched like a piece of melting chewing gum abandoned on the sidewalk, bits of him flitting between past and future, between the air-conditioned, bloody corridors of StrexCorp and the cold, distant stars beyond the farthest research of the known universe, ancient mysteries to which his own life is forfeit.

Tamika looks just as shell-shocked as he feels. She slides down against the wall beside him and places her hand in his. Does she remember the old reality right before the train jumped tracks into this one? He desperately hopes she doesn’t. He’s the only one who needs to bear that burden.

This Tamika, the Tamika who is bruised and bloodied, who’s had the spirit wrenched out of her by a hooded figure, but who is very much alive, whose small, broad hand is warm against his own cold skin, never told him what he meant to her, but he can’t un-know it, either, and he’s grateful for that. It matters, that she’s there to bear witness. He aches where Carlos is no longer holding him, but at least he isn’t alone.

“You’re staring,” Tamika says. “What do you see?”

In truth, he sees her dying in his arms with the bodies of her comrades scattered like dry leaves over plastic sheeting. “Just a girl,” he says. “A little girl who is stronger than she should ever need to be.”

She squeezes his hand. “This little girl’s getting you the fuck out of here.”

“I’m not going anywhere,” he replies. “It would—I would be honored if you stayed. But you’ll need to hide.”

“…why?”

“Because,” Kevin says, stepping out into the hallway. He’s bathed in golden light, the hollows where his eyes should have been glowing coals, scarlet veins spreading from his core like the branches of a tree in winter. Cecil can’t help but think that he looks beautiful, unearthly, like an angel would if angels were real, and he wonders how anyone could ever think that they look alike. “He’s just shattered the fabric of reality to save your life. And if the Smiling God wasn’t awake before, He’s certainly paying attention _now_.”


	20. The Puppets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Cecil and Kevin read the traffic. Carlos and Tamika find out what it takes to defeat a god.

Cecil is in front of her immediately, pushing himself up the wall while Tamika digs in her backpack for a hardcover edition of _Crime and Punishment._ It’s time for the big guns. Kevin just chortles, musical and glorious. 

“Wanna talk about it?”

“Sure, Kevin,” Cecil says. “Let’s talk. That’s a nice look you have going on, by the way.”

Kevin moves towards him very quickly, and his hand is around Cecil’s neck faster than Tamika can fire. He sniffs at his double. Traces a circle around one eye socket with a translucent thumb; the skin where his hand leaves it turns blackened and blistered. “You’ll look like this soon enough.”

Tamika edges forward. “Stay back,” Cecil chokes. The band of the slingshot is taut. She could hit Kevin at this range—she couldn’t miss—but not necessarily before he gouges Cecil’s eyeballs out. To Kevin, he just says, “What do you want to talk about?”

Tamika sees a tentacle slither out from behind his back, gliding up the wall as it moves towards Kevin’s throat. In a single movement, Kevin lashes out and grabs it, twisting it sharply. Putrid smoke eddies from his fist. Cecil screams.

“Do you have to be so gosh-darned _difficult?_ ” Kevin chides. “No wonder Mother up and left.” He flattens the tentacle against the wall with his nails; it bubbles at the point of contact, and Tamika covers her nose and mouth at the reek of burned flesh. “Sweet, _delectable_ Cecil, the moment upper management changes its policy on you, I’m going to carve out your beating heart and serve it to your _party-pooper_ of a boyfriend.” 

“What do you want?” 

“I have what I want,” Kevin says. “The blazing sun, illuminating us all with His love. You need only to stop fighting and embrace it. But you won’t. For the longest time I’d hoped—we could have been such _good friends_ —and I wanted so much to be your friend. But you’re just too stubborn, aren’t you, too silly and lazy and distractible, too resistant to change. You lack _vision_. Lauren doesn’t accept that, but I do.” He giggles. “Can you still see outside?”

Cecil nods. “Can you?”

“I can see the highway.” His voice grows a shade deeper, the way it does when he’s narrating some unseen event. “The traffic is moving, a steady stream where the 800 continues away from Night Vale and Desert Bluffs both, into the scrublands and the empty wastes. Are you watching the cars?”

Two of Cecil’s eyes shut; the other remains fixedly open. Tamika draws back as the two men’s near-identical faces mirror each other in a silence that threatens to erupt into bloodshed at any second. The terrain of the combat has shifted from physical to verbal. Almost imperceptibly, Kevin’s grip on Cecil slackens; still, Tamika doubts he’s any safer. The hand closest to her is raised, his slashed palm towards her, warning her to keep back.

“There is,” Cecil says, “a vehicle stopped by the side of the road. It’s a van, airbrushed with 19th century illustrations of merriment long past, the noses squished and the mouths distorted like stretched taffy. The van has a flat tire.”

“It’s only a temporary delay,” Kevin replies, “and the puppeteer has lots of time before his next performance begins. He is opening a black box, enjoying [the sunny afternoon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikBg4BDgsso). He pulls two marionettes from the box. He holds one, almost tenderly, he coos to it, its delicate hands swaying in time with his own.”

“One marionette is the mirror image of the other. The puppeteer carved them from the same wood, hung them from the same strings. At night, he keeps them wrapped in velvet, in the same box, nestled side by side.” 

“So that neither marionette will ever be alone,” Kevin effuses, clearly pleased at their effortless collaboration.

“Because strings break.” Cecil’s put on his Doom and Gloom, Five Minutes Until We All Die Horribly voice. “And joints rust, and wood splinters. One puppet is there to replace the other when it’s worn out.”

Kevin draws a line of smoke around Cecil’s neck. “Do you really think it’s going to be you?”

“Tell me, Kevin.” Cecil leans forward so that they’re nose to nose, the same nose, but Cecil radiates darkness as much as Kevin radiates light. “How did it feel, when they burned out your eyes? Was it worth it?” 

Unfazed, Kevin replies. “I don’t remember. How did it feel when that thing came through the mirror and killed you?”

Cecil’s two regular eyes flutter open and stare into the dying-charcoal pits in Kevin’s face. A chill creeps over Tamika’s skin; she’s felt this before, in the Dog Park, she recognizes the sick weight in her stomach and the fluttering of her heart. All of a sudden, Cecil’s familiar presence isn’t that much of a comfort.

“Do you remember the dark planet?” It’s not Cecil; something else is speaking through him, something for which Cecil’s life and her life and Kevin’s life are all quite inconsequential. “Do you want to hear about it? Do you want to know what we are to each other?”

Kevin, burning, incandescent Kevin, doesn’t share her terror. “Why don’t you tell me?”

Years later, she will try to remember what Cecil said. She will struggle to find the right words to describe it, and fail, and be left only with the feeling of ruin, of frozen lifelessness, of an unending, unyielding sadness. Whenever she starts to remember, she will reach, inevitably, for the municipally mandated flask that City Council distributes to each Night Vale citizen upon their twenty-first birthday, and when the sting of the whisky has left her tongue, the pang of loss and grief within her ribcage will still remain.

Kevin, though, doesn’t weep. Kevin laughs. He throws his head back and laughs, and laughs until tears of blood like molten lava stream from his empty eye sockets and down his face.

 

* * *

 

A thin line of yellow light blazes around the outline of the laboratory door. Halfway down the hallway, the heat soaks through the soles of Carlos’s sneakers. It radiates through his bone marrow. There is one place in the world he wants to be right now, and it isn’t here. The rifle is clumsy and cheap in his hand, a toy gun, firing toy bullets. He’s not even sure why he brought it; it’s less use against a god than the slingshots and machetes that the kids are carrying. 

How _do_ you fight a god? If he’d been a better Catholic, or a worse scientist, he’d probably know the answer to that. 

“Stay back,” he tells the kids. There’s already enough blood on his hands.

“Like we’re even gonna,” Deanna replies. 

He swallows and nods. “I’m going to run in and, uh, pull the plug.” That’s all he can think to do. It’s slightly more complicated than that, but the urgency of their predicament has stripped his usual instinct to explain the technical minutia to its bare bones. “If I die in the attempt, try not to also die.” 

_And try not to let it convert you into a drooling corporate StrexBot,_ he thinks to add, but that isn’t really necessary. The kids aren’t like he is; aren’t consumed with doubt and contradiction. They don’t compartmentalize. They know right from wrong, and they act on the former against the latter without hesitation or angst. Even before the bowling alley, Carlos doubts he was ever that fearless, and definitely not when he was their age.

“Right.” In Tamika’s absence, Deanna appears to have taken over leadership of the ragtag insurgency. “Load up with Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins, whatever you have.” 

“Those are all kind of problematic,” Ahmed points out. “Plus I hate Dawkins.”

Deanna rolls her eyes. “Everyone hates Dawkins. You don’t need to read it, just fire it at the thing.”

“Ready?” Carlos asks. The two smaller kids nod quickly, followed by a slower acknowledgment from Megan. He tenses, tightens his grip on the rifle, and throws the door open.

The light is blinding; he closes his eyes but his eyelids have grown translucent. Through his hazy vision, the Subtle Bomb is surrounded by a ring of shimmering, nearly invisible bodies, mindless StrexDrones with burning eyes and grinning mouths, holding hands in a circle around it. The light shines through the weapon’s casing. It shines through Carlos, through the Book Club behind him, firing away. It blazes through his sternum, and his heart beats faster, truer, in its presence. It fills him with its flawless, hideous, unbearable love.

“ _Carlos,_ ” he hears, and at first he thinks it’s the Smiling God, but it’s coming from under a table. The one place the light hasn’t absolutely penetrated; Lauren is huddled in the weapon’s shadow. She’s curled in a fetal position, her bloody suit jacket discarded beside her, the pale skin on her face and shoulders reddened by the heat. Dried tears cling to her flawless cheekbones.

He kneels beside her. “Are you—”

“He doesn’t want me,” Lauren whimpers. “After all I’ve done, after everyone I’ve liquidated—” 

“That’s a hell of a glass ceiling.” Carlos risks a glance up, then regrets it. “Your god is a massive jerkwad.”

“Can you stop it?”

He shudders, despite the heat. “I don’t think so,” Carlos admits. “But I have to try.” He stands, shakily, his knees creaking in protest, and faces his creation. He can barely look at it. The Book Club has cleared a path, lined with fallen office workers, to the power cells, which, technically, can be disconnected. He rips off the sleeves of his shirt and wraps the fabric around his hands.

He dashes across the floor and rips the power source loose. He’s assaulted with a flash of heat—the strips of flannel around his hands are on fire, and he tears them off and stomps at the flames—and love, so much love and peace and acceptance that he thinks his heart might burst, even though such an event is biologically improbable at best.

_No,_ he thinks at the Smiling God. _I do not believe in you. I believe in science._

The Subtle Bomb’s roar splits the air in half, quakes across dimensions. It might scoff at Lauren’s adoration, but it _needs_ his.

_I do not believe. You are an object created from matter and energy. You have a tangible, material presence in the universe. You are not sacred._  

Transparent hands, ablaze with boiling veins, clutch at his legs. Carlos kicks them away and they crumple like the abandoned exoskeleton of a cicada. The weapon should be dead, the engine shutting down, the heat venting and dissipating. But it isn’t. It loves, it loves completely and perfectly, and now it knows itself.

_But I don’t love you. I could_ never _love you. My heart is already full, and there is no room for anything else._  

The Smiling God rages, and it burns, and worse, it _forgives_ , but he stands against it nevertheless. He can feel the kids beside him, clinging as fiercely to literature and struggle and a dream of a better world as he clings to scientific skepticism and Cecil. He holds fast and it blasts at him, the heat buffeting at him from every direction, and he thinks, _this is it,_ _this is how I die, a stubborn paragon of the Enlightenment to the bitter end._  

_I believe in science. I love Cecil. I believe in science._ His mantra, a record on repeat, is armor against the onslaught. He resists, the sparking battery cells in his hands, he fights, and it isn’t enough. He’s just one man, raging against the divine, and its iron fist closes around him and he crumples to his knees. 

A long shadow falls over him; water in the desert. He lifts his head. He can’t make out the details of the figure, backlit and blurry, just its familiar, beloved shape, arms outstretched. _No, no, you shouldn’t be here, this is the last place you should be._ Carlos is burning from the inside, consumed by the very monster he’s unleashed on the world, and Cecil is still trying to save him.

“Get away.” His shout is a dried up, dead thing in his throat. “It’s self-aware. It can’t be shut down.”

High above the fray is Tamika’s bitter war cry. “ _Nosce te ipsum!”_

Carlos climbs to his feet. Tamika dances across the bloody floor of the laboratory, whirls and flings a battered copy of _Being and Nothingness_ into the bomb’s yellow eye. The Smiling God’s shudder of pain echoes through him, a piercing wail of despair and self-doubt. No sooner does it shriek than Tamika sends a volley of Beckett and Camus. Another _thwap,_ and _The Bell Jar_ hits the weapon’s casing, causing it—as far as Carlos can interpret—about the same amount of psychic agony as he experienced when he read it in college.

He stumbles along the side of the Subtle Bomb—which is now beset with a flapping, spitting, snarling edition of _The Painted Bird—_ determined to get to Cecil. Inside its prison, the relic writhes and seethes, consumed with an onslaught of existential terror. Its fear is a visceral force, shaking the weapon where it stands in the middle of the laboratory, and Tamika keeps firing at it, snarling with all the pent-up rage and pain that’s been building in her since she first set foot in Desert Bluffs: “Wouldn’t it be better to just _not be?_ ” 

Cecil—no, not Cecil, of course it isn’t—doesn’t seem to notice Carlos’s presence. The part of his face where his eyes should be is concerned only with the Subtle Bomb. He is illuminated, blazing white-hot, and he’s laughing.

There’s something different in the quality of Kevin’s laughter. Carlos, his head buzzing with the agony of a million bee stings, doesn’t realize what’s changed. Not at first.

The weapon is contorted in a downward spiral of morbid introspection, and Kevin is laughing at it.

Tamika yanks his arm and hauls him to shelter behind a rack of equipment. Her friends are huddled by the wall, their ammunition spent, skin blistered and cracking from the heat. 

“What’s wrong with him?” Carlos asks.

“Cecil did something to him. I think it made him crazy.”

“Where is—”

“Shh. He’s here. I think. Stay down; this is bigger than we are.”

Carlos peeks out through the rows of Erlenmeyer flasks at the battle, at Lauren, shivering under the table, at Kevin, consumed by the Smiling God’s fire, tendrils of darkness emanating from his flaming body, at the Subtle Bomb, juddering and warping in the flames of its own sudden, devastating uncertainty. Tamika and Megan grab him and push him to the floor, as the ground heaves and the equipment rattles and then everything goes blinding white.

 

* * *

 

If Carlos passes out, it’s not for long; his new and improved brain doesn’t really do the dead faint he dearly wishes it could manage. He picks himself up off the floor, brushing splinters of shattered glass from his palms. The kids are already coming to behind him. It’s so quiet he thinks that the explosion has burst his eardrums until Lauren, on the opposite side of the room, gives a little cough.

He forces himself to look. 

The hulking weapon is a smoking shell, the golden relic within it cooling to black. He can no longer hear its voice. Sprawled on his back in front of it, his skin blackened and a wide, pointed smile on his face, is Kevin. Carlos should be relieved, but the lifeless body looks enough like Cecil that he still bends down to feel for a pulse, and the charred shell crumbles to ash.

And then he can’t look at anything else. Softly, a prayer as much as it is a question, he whispers, “Cecil?”

“…hi Carlos.”

Cecil’s slumped in the door frame. Carlos rushes to him, picks him up and cradles him, kisses the top of his head. There are scorch marks on his face and neck, but he’s breathing in ragged hitches, and he manages enough strength to curl his arm around Carlos’s shoulders.

“Hey,” Cecil says. “The light went out.” 

“Did you—” He tries again. “Was it you? Or the Voice, or…?” 

Cecil shakes his head. “Don’t talk about it. I don’t want to talk about anything that just happened. I want to go home. Carlos, can we go home now?”

Carlos hugs him as tightly as he can without hurting him worse, then glares past him at Lauren, who’s standing with her arms crossed in front of him.

“I’m taking him out of here,” Carlos says. “If any of your office ghouls try to stop me, I will dismember them with my bare hands and donate their skin to the librarians to bind new editions of all of the books we just lost. Is that understood?” 

Lauren smirks. “I see you’ve found your balls. Don’t worry, Carlos.” She slides her hand over the Subtle Bomb’s cooling casing. “I’m not angry with you. What is chaos but opportunity? What is failure but a stepping stone on the road to success?” She steps towards him, then chortles, her hands raised to show that she’s unarmed. “No one’s standing in your way.”

He gathers Cecil into his arms and carries him back out through the corpse-strewn hallways, out the emergency exit to the parking lot while Ahmed and Deanna bicker over who gets to earn their Advanced Lock Picking badge first until Megan smashes open the door to one of the vans with her meaty, sentient fist. 

Carlos buckles Cecil into the passenger seat while Tamika hotwires the vehicle, takes the wheel once the kids have all piled into the back. Without a look back at StrexCorp Synergists Inc.’s distribution center, he guns the engine and drives like hell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's weather—as well as the story about the marionettes—is shamelessly stolen from Krzysztof Kieślowski's "La double vie de Véronique."


	21. The Contract

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Leaving Desert Bluffs isn't a straightforward prospect. Cecil makes a decision.

He drives for a very long time.

Highway 800 is a long, straight scar cutting through the dry desert hills, the tarmac gleaming beneath a late afternoon sun that never seems to sink any lower, though the clock on the dashboard moves forward. He passes the exit for Pine Cliff and the one for Red Mesa, a sign proclaiming a McDonald’s in 30 miles, then somehow he’s back, 12 miles out of Desert Bluffs and it starts all over again.

Cecil slides in and out of consciousness in the seat beside him. Every so often, he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the side mirror and ducks his head, grimacing. Carlos doesn’t even look; there are few other cars on the road, so he makes do with the mirror on his side and the rearview one above his head.

“Are you still here?” Cecil mumbles for about the fiftieth time, grasping for Carlos. Carlos takes his right hand off the wheel and squeezes Cecil’s fingers.

“I’m here, Cecil. You’re here. We’re all safe.” God, he’s a mess. He should be in a hospital. Carlos isn’t naïve enough to think that he could take Cecil to a hospital outside of Night Vale and have it go well for any of them, but maybe a lifetime of being a test subject in a government lab is preferable to Cecil dying before they reach city limits. 

If they ever reach city limits.

“Can we listen to the radio?” Deanna asks from the back seat.

It seems like a good idea. Carlos releases Cecil’s hand long enough to fiddle with the dials. He gets snippets of voices, but they’re all distorted and slowed down and it makes him edgy and uncomfortable, so he finds a space in between stations where it’s just white noise. The static seems to calm Cecil enough that he leans his head against the window and shuts his eyes, so Carlos leaves it there.

One hour passes, then the next, monotonous slopes of dun and ochre, the sun beating a hazy film above the endless highway. 

“It’s my fault,” Tamika says after the third hour.

Carlos—who had been thinking along entirely different lines—says, “What?” 

“When I crossed over.” There’s no inflection in her voice. It’s as flat as the background wall of static. “The hooded figure told me that the portal only went one-way. It took something from me.” Her eyes are wide and dark and brimming with tears in the rearview mirror. “I think it took _Night Vale._ ” 

“That’s stupid,” Ahmed says. “It didn’t do anything to the rest of us.”

“You saved the whole city,” Deanna points out. “They can’t not let you back in.”

“It’s not you, Tamika,” Carlos says. “It’s me. I’m the one who isn’t allowed back.”

Cecil’s nails dig into the back of his hand, and he almost swerves off the road. He didn’t even realize Cecil was awake. 

“No.” Cecil says. “No, no, no. I don’t _care_ how immutable the laws of the universe are, they don’t get to keep you out. I can’t—” His voice cracks, and he stops there. They pass the exit for Pine Cliff. Again.

“It’s not an issue of the immutable laws of the universe,” Carlos says. He’s pretty sure that the transdimensional orange juice would have taken care of that. “It’s more the only-slightly-more-mutable specifics of contract law.” 

Quiet, and static, then Tamika says, “Oh _gods._ You still work for StrexCorp. That’s why Lauren let us leave. She knew it wouldn’t matter.”

Carlos nods. “I had to sign a binding contract for life—Cecil, Christ, please stop crying, it was the _only way._ They’d have found someone to say yes to the offer and finished the bomb and converted all of Night Vale, and tortured you until you were as insane as Kevin.” They pass a sign for a truck stop and motel, and he takes the next exit. “I am going to find you a way back. I promise. I will get you all home.”

He drives down a quiet road. There’s a beacon shining before him; a motel—only the O and the E in the sign are still illuminated—with a few cars in the parking lot and a light in the office. The sky has gone from blue to deep violet all at once, as if making up for lost time. “I just need to think.” 

The motel is an artifact from the 1970s, all wood paneling and filthy carpets. He digs into his wallet and finds, amid reams of StrexCorp company scrip, a credit card he hasn’t used for over a year. The owner gives them skeptical glances. They’re all covered in blood; Cecil, still wrapped in a hospital gown and Carlos’s lab coat, is unconscious in Megan’s arms. At a glance Deanna might pass for Carlos’s daughter and Tamika for Cecil’s, but none of them looks particularly trustworthy. Nevertheless, the card goes through, and it’s enough for the owner to not ask them any questions.

He settles Cecil on one of the beds and pulls the horrid puke-brown duvet over his shoulders. As if an autopilot, he covers the mirror in the bedroom and the one in the bathroom, and, just in case, the one in the closet. He paces. For a few minutes, he sits beside Cecil and kneads the back of his neck.

The room, with its dingy oil paintings and peeling wallpaper, is stiflingly hot and claustrophobic. His chest constricts. He needs to escape. The kids are all staring at him, expectantly, and he wants to tell them that Tamika’s the leader, not him, he’s just an observer, a desperately tired, frightened observer who wants nothing more than to curl up beside his gravely injured boyfriend and sleep forever.

“I—I need to run out for a bit,” he stammers. “I’m really sorry, I’ll be back soon.” 

Before any of them can argue, he stumbles outside, into the cool dusk.

 

* * *

 

Carlos stands in the orange light of the “O E” sign, a plastic bag of first aid supplies and questionable snacks from the 7-Eleven down the street clasped in his hand, and struggles to control his panic. He fidgets. He wishes he smoked. He digs in his pocket for his cell phone before he remembers that he left it behind in the desert hellscape. He remembers that he left Doug and Alicia and Alicia’s Bichon Frisé in the desert hellscape too, and he will never have a chance to say goodbye, and that it is easier to not say goodbye, thus leaving open the option of an impermanent parting, than what he will have to endure next.

He walks up the stairs to the second row of rooms like a man on his way to his own execution, and unlocks the door. Most of the kids are in the room next door holding the world’s most militant slumber party. Cecil and Tamika are sitting on the edge of the bed, faced away from him, one of his tentacles draped over the girl’s shoulders. They’re speaking too quietly for him to hear at first, but he has a momentary pang at the thought, unbidden, that given the opportunity Cecil would have been a really good father. 

“It doesn’t ever go away,” Cecil is saying to her. “It doesn’t get better. Grief doesn’t need to fade; it just waits for you to adjust to it.”

Tamika’s head turns as Carlos slips into the room. “I’ll be right next door,” she says, patting Cecil’s hand as she stands up. She grabs a handful of chip bags. “You guys probably need to—whatever.”

“We definitely need to whatever.” Carlos says, and she scurries out the door. He takes her place beside Cecil, who runs an admiring hand over the taut muscles of his bare arm.

“You,” Cecil says, “need to always be dressed like this. Can you always be dressed like this?”

His heart is still making a bid for escape, but he lets himself grin. If he’s honest with himself, he’d give Cecil anything he asked for right now. “You need to never be dressed like _that_ again. Megan brought extra clothes with her, actually, you can…” They should talk, Carlos thinks, they really, absolutely need to talk, but Cecil is a master of ignoring what he doesn’t want to confront, and that particular talent is contagious. Trembling so much he can barely hold a glass of water, he unscrews the bottle of painkillers and shakes the pills into Cecil’s hand. 

“I’m going to take a bath,” Cecil says, which is entirely sensible in theory, but in practice ends up with Carlos anxiously twisting his hands outside the washroom while he listens to Cecil splash around in the tub and reflecting that, yes, actually, they are both overdue for their regularly scheduled nervous breakdowns.

“You can come in if you want,” Cecil says faintly from behind the door, and Carlos almost dies of relief. It’s a stupidly small bathtub and Cecil is folded almost in half, his hair in bedraggled wet tangles, tentacles squished up the wall and his knees bent to his chin. With most of the blood scrubbed away, he looks less scarily close to death but no less vulnerable. Carlos perches on the edge of the tub.

“Is it okay to touch you?” He feels stupid for even having to ask, but it’s even harder than usual to gauge what’s going on in Cecil’s head, and he’s had awful things done to him, and Carlos has been the source of the worst of his trauma, and _oh God, what if Cecil doesn’t even want him anymore?_  

“I have been waiting almost a _year_ for you to touch me,” Cecil says, and Carlos remembers how to breathe again, picks up the little bar of soap and the washcloth, and as gently as he can manage between the gashes and bruises and burns, starts washing his back. Cecil sighs and droops his head forward, shifting some of his tentacles so that Carlos can reach them. It’s always been easier to do things than to talk about them, so he lets them both lapse into silence, running the washcloth over Cecil until the painkillers kick in and he feels the other man relax.

“Still here?” Cecil asks, which strikes Carlos as ridiculous given that he’s currently clearly visible, massaging the motel’s cheap shampoo through Cecil’s hair.

“Where else would I be?”

“Am _I_ ,” Cecil clarifies, “still here?”

“Yeah.” Carlos says. “You’re still here.” Cecil’s delirious, and even if he wasn’t, it isn’t fair to expect him to make any more sense than he usually does. Carlos rinses out his hair and helps him to the bed. The scars StrexCorp has left on him stand out in stark contrast to the meticulous ones he’s carved in himself, an ugly defilement of the intricate, ritualistic whorls and spirals. Carlos methodically inspects each one, applies antiseptic and gauze from the 7-Eleven bag, wincing every time Cecil does. He doesn’t think anything’s broken, which isn’t a matter of restraint on his torturers’ parts so much as that they probably didn’t want him to die or become unproductively disabled before he embraced the divine light of the Smiling God.

_Well,_ Carlos thinks ruefully, _thank fuck for miracles._

The tentacle Kevin gnawed off is the worst of his injuries, the stump ragged and scabbed over with dried ichor, and Carlos avoids going near it until he absolutely has to. Cecil starts crying again the moment he touches it, and he drops it in horror. The last thing he wants to do is cause Cecil more pain. He could jump back into the van and drive back to Desert Bluffs and kill every last one of them, guilty or not, for what they’ve done to him, but instead he just clutches Cecil to his chest and rubs little circles into his back. 

“Can we listen to the radio some more?” Cecil asks. Carlos is reaching for the portable radio Tamika left in the room before he’s even finished his sentence, tries to tune it before Cecil yanks it out of his hands and somehow, through some mystical radio professional alchemy, manages to land it on NVCR just as his show is coming on. 

_“That which does not kill you,_ ” Intern Maureen is saying, _“softens you up for that which will. Welcome to Night Vale.”_

“At least we can hear it from here,” Carlos says. “We can’t be far away.” He means that to be comforting, but it seems to have the opposite effect. Cecil curls up with his head on Carlos’s lap and lets him clean and bandage his maimed tentacle and dress him in Megan’s massive t-shirt and sweatpants, but he sobs the whole time and won’t speak.

Maureen announces that Hiram has set the last suspected StrexCorp-owned building in Night Vale on fire. There are reports of explosions in Desert Bluffs. Dana, apparently with Maureen in the studio, expresses the hope that this bodes well for the speedy return of the show’s regular host. For whatever reason, this just seems to make Cecil even more upset.

“It is going to be fine,” Carlos tells him, though naturally this is true only on a macro scale. The earth will continue to rotate. The billions of humans living on it will continue to live their lives in much the same fashion as they had, before this arbitrary point in history, unless it is their day to cease doing so. This tendency towards inertia guarantees nothing in regards to Cecil’s future happiness, no matter how important that might be to Carlos.

Maureen is talking about an entire family in Old Town swallowed by a gelatinous cube. Cecil says, so incredibly quietly that Carlos momentarily mistakes it for [something in the weather](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lkBpz5ci3g4): “We need to get the kids home.”

It’s most lucid than he’s been in the past hour. “Of course.”

“We’ll have to drive as close as we can before the highway loops back again,” Cecil continues. “They can walk from there. It’s far, but…they’re very strong. They know how to survive in the desert.”

Carlos is, admittedly, not amazing at inference, but even he can’t fail to grasp what’s behind Cecil’s words. “Do you?” he asks. “I mean, can you survive…you know?”

“Better than I can survive without you.”

Carlos frowns. He’s been over this series of hypotheticals already, more often than Cecil has. Not to mention that Cecil, no matter how many times he explains it, isn’t going to understand what the problem with going to a normal part of the country will be until he gets there. Carlos is still trying to justify it to himself—Cecil can keep his tentacles retracted, he normally does when he’s out anyway, and his hair is almost long enough that it covers his third eye, and there are regular humans who are into scarification; what is staid in Night Vale might pass as intriguingly exotic somewhere like San Francisco—when Cecil clears his throat. “People do leave, you know. Michael Sandero went to Michigan.” He pronounces it _Mitch-Again_ and Carlos thinks, yeah, he would actually probably rather die than lose this impossible, wonderful man. 

Maureen says, “ _Stay tuned for a sleepless night, during which you relive the myriad petty humiliations and byzantine politics of junior high. Until tomorrow, Night Vale. Until tomorrow.”_

Cecil tugs him down on the bed and wraps around him, and Carlos can pretend that they’re home, that the worst is over. He breathes a soft kiss against Cecil’s temple. “Go to sleep,” he says. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

 

* * *

 

Tired as he is, Cecil sleeps uneasily. 

The small, semi-broken fan by the window is terrible at its sole job, beating the stale mix of oxygen and old nicotine around the room in a way that somehow fails to make the room any cooler. The heat lies over him like a heavy, sticky woolen blanket. His entire body is a festering sore, and no matter how much he tosses and turns, despite Carlos’s careful, gentle caresses and quiet reassurances, he can’t get comfortable in any position. 

When he dreams, it’s of knives and yellow grins, of a dark planet eating a hole in the sky. 

Sometimes, he is standing on the desert highway, telling Tamika that he can’t follow her. He can’t go home. She would die for him, has died for him, and he will never be free of this. Their town demands too much of both of them, and he craves love over duty, and if the Voice has a problem with it, maybe it should have chosen someone other than a 15-year-old radio geek who’d had his whole life ahead of him to fulfill its prophecies.

Other times, he turns the blade inwards on his own heart and it’s Carlos he betrays. _Sorry, my love, when I said I would go with you, I lied,_ he will say at the last minute, _I do that sometimes, we all must be liars to survive in this world._  

All night, Carlos holds him tightly and doesn’t sleep, and he’s selfishly grateful for that, for the burden of his own survival rest in someone else’s hands, for being cared for by his very favorite person in the world after months of loneliness. He’d have endured years of torture if it meant that at the end of it all, Carlos still loved him. He drifts off, worried and guilt-stricken, dreaming of restraints and blood running down the walls and the shell that remains of a human body when its life is burnt out of it.

Carlos is sitting in the chair by the bed when he wakes, doodling on a pad of paper left on the nightstand. He’s drawing with a _pen_ ; Cecil gasps, scandalized and more than a little turned on, before he remembers that they’re still far enough from Night Vale for it not to be an issue. Cecil pulls himself up, his body creaking and complaining in ways it didn’t used to, and glances at it. 

Carlos has drawn the same thing, in shades of blue ink on bits of paper scattered across the nightstand, ten or so times, rendered in loving detail, as if the pen itself were softly touching his sleeping subject’s face. Cecil picks one of the sketches up, puzzling over the mess of curly hair, the lips slightly parted, the one eye that remains open even in sleep. Cecil takes selfies every so often, to determine when he needs a haircut, and he’s never pleased with what he sees. He likes Carlos’s version better.

“Is that what I look like?” 

Carlos laughs. “You’re much handsomer,” he says, though Cecil knows that’s a blatant fiction and he couldn’t be more ordinary looking if his parents had planned out the course of their courtship and procreation in order to combine the most average genes possible. “I can’t get it perfect.”

“You don’t need to,” Cecil replies. “Only one of us needs to be perfect, and it’s certainly not me. Can I keep one?”

“As many as you want. They’re kind of terrible. I just want one. You know, if—I mean, I don’t have many pictures of you.”

“Do you need them or something?” Now is as good a time as any. He eyes the old-fashioned phone by the bed. “I’m not going back to Night Vale.” 

“I don’t want you to have to make that choice, Cecil.”

He holds his hand out for Carlos to take. The radio is broadcasting the repeated sound of what he thinks might be raw meat slapping against plastic wrap. It’s a bit distracting; they are trying to have a serious conversation. Station Management should really review some of its programming decisions… “You left your weekend lab coat at the apartment,” he says. “The really nice one.”

“The one I wore on our first date?”

“I slept with it, sometimes. Until it stopped smelling like you. And Khoshekh shed all over it, sorry about that, but you weren’t there, and you had barely even been there to start, you hadn’t even really unpacked before—” Carlos leans forward, frowning, and he shakes his head. “I’m not going to start bawling all over you again, don’t worry. But I missed you.”

“I missed you too,” Carlos says, and it sounds too much like a question for Cecil’s comfort.

“So we can do that? Just…escape?”

“We can try.” 

“Neat.” Cecil smiles, though it feels stiff and wrong on his battered face. “That’s—all I want, my beautiful Carlos, soon to be perfect Carlos once his hair grows back. To be with you.” 

Carlos presses their foreheads together, strokes the side of Cecil’s swollen jaw, and Cecil is content—more than content, overjoyed—to just breathe the same air as the love of his life. 

_This is the right decision_ , Cecil thinks, _this is the only decision,_ right up until the instant when the door is smashed in and they’re both thrown to the floor with bags shoved roughly over their heads, and then he’s hauled to his feet and dragged, kicking and screaming, from the room.


	22. Petrichor

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Carlos goes to Heaven. Then he goes home.

Carlos blinks into glaring purple light as the sack is yanked off his head. He’s seated in a hard plastic chair in a large, windowless room, and there’s something strange about the floor, a hum that vibrates through the carpet and makes the walls quiver. Violet LED lighting strips run along the edges of the floor, and even if his field of vision wasn’t mostly occupied by a guy in a gimp mask and cape, it looks so patently absurd that he’s immediately reassured that he has not, after all, been kidnapped by StrexCorp.

The air is different, too: stale, recycled through a rattling ventilation system, and missing the coppery tang of blood.

“Where’s Cecil?” is his first question, then, as the purple light catches the outline of a silver star, “am I under arrest?” The star looks cheap, a plastic toy you’d retrieve from the bottom of a cereal box. If Carlos hadn’t been witness to countless dazed Night Valians staggering home after re-education, it would be impossible to take the man seriously. 

“You’re not,” the Sheriff of Night Vale says through his vocoder. “He is.” 

Behind a line of secret police officers, Tamika and her friends are crouched on the floor in a protective huddle around Cecil. “Don’t you fucking dare,” Tamika growls.

“Possession of illicit and unregistered bloodstones,” the Sheriff lists, motioning for his people to clear away from them. “Unauthorized time travel.”

“It was only a little bit,” Cecil protests. “And it was an emergency.” 

“Dereliction of duty.” 

“Maybe that.”

The Sheriff kneels to be at eye-level with him. “But you helped save the town, and you wouldn’t survive a re-education session. So I suspect our illustrious mayor will want to give all six of you scofflaws medals of some description.” 

Cecil blinks. “You’re taking me home?”

“I’m taking you to an undisclosed location for debriefing,” the Sheriff says gruffly—insofar as a synthesized voice can manage gruff—and clearly overcompensating for the fact that he’s as relieved to find Cecil alive as anyone else would be. “And I’m confiscating those bloodstones.” 

“They’re Old Woman Josie’s,” Tamika says, gripping her backpack tighter. 

In lieu of a readable facial expression, the Sheriff cocks his head to one side. “I’ll take it up with her,” he says, gesturing for his officers to conduct a search of the kids’ backpacks. “In the meantime, does anyone want a drink?” 

Carlos lets himself relax. He’s not going to die. Cecil’s not going to die. The rest can be worked out, in time. The floor resonates beneath his feet; he takes a moment to adjust to the feeling of being airborne in a structure that, scientifically speaking, should not be able to fly, then stands up, stretching his arms and legs as he staggers his way over to Cecil.

Before he can reach Cecil and his fierce battalion of adolescent defenders, the Sheriff is stepping between them with an iron grip on his arm. “Not so fast,” he says. “Someone wants a word with you first.” 

Carlos strains to see past the bulk of his black cloak. Cecil nods wearily, permission enough to give in. They’re both sick of fighting. He lets the Sheriff guide him from the main room of his floating office, down a short corridor to a door plastered in warnings ranging from a simple, “PRIVATE—KEEP OUT” to, “WE HAVE EXTENSIVE RECORDS OF YOUR INNERMOST FEARS AND DESIRES AND WILL USE THIS KNOWLEDGE TOWARDS YOUR DOWNFALL IN SUBTLE WAYS AND AT UNSPECIFIED TIMES.” 

“Are you going to shove me out an airlock?” Carlos asks, only half joking.

The Sheriff sounds genuinely surprised. “Why would I do that?” He opens the door. Deep indigo light radiates from within, blanketing cartons of munitions and rusty loading equipment in an unearthly luminescence. Shimmering glorious in the drab architecture of the ship’s landing bay is a number of tall, sinuous figures with glorious wings, peering curiously at him through a multitude of unblinking, opalescent eyes. A low, mournful French horn sounds the most beautiful music he has ever heard, and tears rush to his eyes. 

He is frightened. He is awed. He has many reactions, all simultaneously, too many for his underequipped sense of reason and his belief in material reality and the generally progressive march of history to properly encompass.

The Sheriff says: “Welcome to Heaven, Carlos.”

 

* * *

 

Technically speaking, of course, it is not _really_ Heaven. It is still the landing bay of the Sheriff’s hovering office. But it is also, at this present moment, rented out to the Erikas to be used for heavenly purposes on an as-needed basis, and, you, fragile, mortal reader, are _you_ going to really argue with them? 

Carlos can’t begin to think of what to say to the Erikas. He’s had enough of gods and eldritch horrors and angelic emissaries for a lifetime. All he wants is to be snuggled up in a blanket fort watching nature documentaries with Cecil—who may very well be an eldritch horror in his own right, but he’s an eldritch horror who can appreciate a good blanket fort. He’s sick to death of having powerful emotions thrust upon him. If he must feel things like love and terror, he’d much rather feel them on a regular human scale.

Still, Carlos’s father did not bring him up to be impolite, so he says, “Hi Erikas.”

The Erikas explain to him, via interpretive dance, elaborate pantomime, and one or two cue cards in transliterated Babylonian, that they won’t keep him long. They understand that he’s a busy man with a great deal on his mind. They also understand that his contract with StrexCorp has become an issue of concern. They would like to propose a solution.

They, as it happens, own a StrexCorp facility in Night Vale. Should he consider relocating his laboratory inside the building and accepting an employment offer from the angels, he would no longer be in violation of his contract with the company by living nearby. 

Carlos reacts as any man would when, after having thought he’d lost everything is given, all at once, absolutely everything he has ever wanted. Which is to say that he goes a bit weak in the knees and has to sit down for a bit. The angels, to their credit, let him process. 

“What’s the catch?” he asks after a long pause. 

There is no catch. There is always a catch.

He will see wonders and horrors. He will be in service to the angels, and the angels’ purposes, which he will not be able to fully understand unless he, like Erika née Marcus Vanston and Erika née Intern Vithya, ascends to their higher plane of existence. He will, of course, be party to forbidden knowledge. He will encounter much that contradicts things about which he has previously had certainty.

Just that.

“You realize that you are doing the equivalent of dangling candy in front of a small child with no impulse control, right?”

Yes, the angels signify through a complicated series of abstract movements. They are very well aware of this, or they wouldn’t be asking.

Disinclined, after everything he has been through, to be optimistic, Carlos asks, “Is this something I need to keep secret from Cecil?”

He doesn’t need to. Cecil can’t officially believe anything he says about his new job. The angels suspect that Cecil doesn’t believe the vast majority of things that Carlos tells him as it is and is just humoring him most of the time. 

“Should I, er, shake your hand or something?”

The Erikas assure him that doing so would be counterproductive. He needs his hands to do science. 

The tension floods out of his body in waves. He sits on an overturned crate, overwhelmed, his head in his hands, and cries until the Sheriff gently guides him out of the landing bay as he murmurs, over and over again, “yes, the answer is yes, yes, yes.”

 

* * *

 

The rest of the journey is a blur to Cecil. 

Tamika and her friends are talking to him, trying to keep him conscious—which, to be blunt, is the last thing he wants—and then Carlos is back, more subdued than before but there nonetheless, and Cecil is being given hot chocolate and wrapped in a blanket and held. He gathers that important things have been decided, somewhere, and they probably involve him, but whatever has just taken place, nothing fatal is going to happen immediately, so he leans against Carlos’s side and drifts off, waking up only when the Sheriff says that they’re hovering above Night Vale General Hospital. 

His stomach lurches. His mind flashes to the gurney, a man in a lab coat grinning over him, the glint of yellow light on the silver instruments. “No, no hospitals, please.” He claws at Carlos’s wrist, fingernails digging in to the soft, perfect skin; he’d burrow inside his boyfriend if he could. 

Carlos, his devoted, understanding Carlos, carefully unlatches his fingers and says, “We can call Teddy to have a look at him. He wants to go home now.”

And so, at long last, he is standing—for a very broad definition of standing—on his street, outside his apartment, in the strange half-light that precedes sunrise. [It’s raining](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztmFsS2JYVI). It so seldom rains in Night Vale that he is immediately concerned that the rain is some new nefarious development, perhaps a chemical weapons test by a vague-yet-menacing government agency, but Carlos assures him that there is a specific, identifiable smell to rain in the desert after a long drought, and he had determined, through rigorous scientific observation, that the rain falling all around them has that scent. 

He breathes it in. It’s been so very long since he’s felt the chill of a desert night, the raindrops collecting in his eyelashes, beading on his parched lips. He shivers. 

“Come on,” Carlos says. “Let’s get you inside.”

Cecil instinctively reaches for his tiepin, but of course he’s dressed in Megan’s oversized clothes with nothing sharp to be found anywhere on his person. There are usually spare blades lying around near the doorway, lest anyone find themselves locked out under similar circumstances, but Carlos stops him. “You’ve lost enough blood lately,” and pricks his own finger.

“Carlos?” Cecil says, catching his hand before he can enact the ritual. “I know you felt at home in the Other Desert.”

“That’s true.” 

“More than you do here.” The apartment, Cecil remembers, is still cluttered with boxes. They’d meant to unpack, but then there had been the picnic, and then Carlos was gone, and in the slow, torturous months that followed, he’d never had the heart to touch them. They had remained in the kitchen he barely used, patiently waiting for their owner to return. Carlos had spent nearly a year in the desert, and only a handful of days living in the apartment he’d rented with Cecil. 

“That,” Carlos admits, “is also true.” 

The distance settles over them both again, the reminder that what is familiar and safe to Cecil will forever be alien to Carlos. Cecil is not as naïvely romantic as people are always suggesting that he is. If he’d wanted permanence—well, he would never be so presumptuous as to ask for permanence. Violent, incomprehensible death is always too close at hand for that. What he wants, considered against the backdrop of an ever-expanding and indifferent universe, has always been irrelevant.

“So if you don’t want—which is to say, bloodstone sigils recognize their owners—” 

“I do want this,” Carlos says, sounding exasperated. Drawing a series of bloody lines over the doorframe, he completes the ritual, which is good enough for the sigils if less than ideally enthusiastic for Cecil. 

Cecil is ready to make all kinds of excuses for the state of the apartment, but it’s actually cleaner than he left it. The numerous empty wine bottles are smashed and transformed into a twisted modern sculpture to which he immediately takes a dislike, but isn’t terrible for a beginner’s effort. His kitchen table is gone for some reason, as are the chairs; he finds them in the bedroom, nailed to the ceiling, holding up a canopy of repurposed drapes and blankets around the bed. The headboard has been replaced by steer skulls, which is a bit gauche and which he imagines he’ll probably bang his head on at some point, but the massive nest of brightly colored pillows more than makes up for it. It’s like sinking into a cloud when he sits down on it, and really very perfect—other than the crinkling noise that he discovers is from the thin layers of snakeskin placed between the sheets. 

“Thanks,” he says, but there’s only a skittering in response. It takes time to rebuild trust. He knows that more than anyone. 

Carlos brings him a glass of brandy and sits on the bed beside him, sipping his own. He’s become so accustomed to drinking alone that it’s strange to have Carlos clink their glasses together and slip an arm around him. “Are you comfortable?” 

There’s no honest answer to that. Cecil laughs nervously. “Sure. Just you and me now, and the Faceless Old Woman, and several of the Sheriff’s Secret Police hiding in the living room.” The brandy, for as long as it lasts, gives him something to do with his hands, but it’s leaving the glass too quickly. “Back to normal. For highly specific parameters of normal.”

Carlos is staring at him, a pained expression on his face. Cecil throws back the rest of the brandy and puts the empty glass on the nightstand, which is unchanged beyond a list of numbers, none of which contain the right number of digits to be phone numbers, left under the phone.

“We should repaint,” he blurts to fill the silence. “The Faceless Old Woman won’t like it, but I don’t think the puce really goes with what she’s done in here.” 

Carlos is quiet for long enough that Cecil almost starts chattering again, his fevered brain concocted a variety of reasons why Carlos might be silent, infinite and anxious permutations of things Carlos could say to destroy him. 

Carlos says, softly, “Cecil, please don’t do this.”

“You like the puce?” Cecil says. “Okay. I can live with it.”

“Don’t do that thing where you act like everything is fine.” Carlos watches the phone uneasily; he knows enough, by now, to be careful about what he says. “I understand why you feel the need. But I don’t think I can do that right now, not after everything.”

“Does talking about it make it any easier?”

“Not usually.” Which is an understatement; in Cecil’s experience, talking about things not being fine typically leads to lengthy sessions in the Dark Box. “But maybe it will this time.” He puts down his glass with half an inch of brandy still at the bottom so that he can lie down facing Cecil, his fingers playing lightly over the rain-damp little hairs on his arm. “Lauren and Kevin came to me with an offer not long after I was stranded in the desert.” 

“ _Stranded,” better than “doing work,” but not as good as “trapped.”_ Cecil frowns; there’s a world of implications left unsaid in Carlos’s choice of verbs, but he also doesn’t think Carlos is heartless enough to know the difference. 

“I knew they would target you. I had to push you away; I couldn’t so much as think of you without putting you in danger, let alone open doors…” He picks at the scab on his finger. “It wasn’t about my career—well, it _was,_ but not entirely. Not mostly.” 

“I never thought it was.”

“That’s not what I meant.” Carlos gathers him closer, Cecil’s head tucked under his chin. It’s the most secure Cecil has felt since—he can’t remember feeling this safe, come to think of it. Carlos’s voice is reedy, halting, but there is no ambivalence in the hand that slides under the baggy t-shirt to rest at the small of his back. Carlos isn’t perfect—Cecil wouldn’t want him to be, there would be no space for anything but disappointment, were that the case—but he’s trying.

“I’m not like you,” Carlos says, “with a set of coordinates corresponding to a place where I belong. There has never been a place that has meant home for me, not somewhere with walls and doors and a definable geographic location and affordable yet tasteful furniture.”

Cecil’s been hurt enough to earn a bit of petulance. “This is not your home. You’ve said as much.” 

“What I mean to say is that home isn’t a _place_.” Carlos’s lips press against the top of his head. “Okay?” 

He nods into Carlos’s shoulder. Carlos is warm and solid against him, and he’s so very tired. He hears Carlos murmur something in his oddly accented dialect of Spanish that sounds nothing like the Weird Spanish he was taught in school, right before sleep finally delivers him to softer, more familiar fears.


	23. Reconstruction

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Mostly fluff, partially scorpion lice.

“—remains under quarantine due to an outbreak of scorpion lice. The Night Vale Medical Association reminds parents to _please_ vaccinate their children, and pet owners to vaccinate their scorpions.” Cecil leans back in his chair, adjusting his headphones. He runs his finger over the varnished edge of the ancient wooden desk. The interns spent hours cleaning out the studio, mopping up the blood and the sticky film of Station Management’s residue that had coated every available surface. It isn’t quite like he remembers it—his personal effects were unsalvageable, and his desk is now bare other than a hastily taken snapshot of Carlos and one of the drawings that Carlos did of him—but he’s reclaimed it nevertheless, reassured by the dusty old equipment and the faint buzz of background radiation.

“And on a personal note, listeners,” he adds. “It’s great to be back. It seems that I have more friends than I thought…”

 

* * *

 

In the hours and days that follow their escape from Desert Bluffs, Carlos begins the slow, difficult process of putting Cecil back together. He is not alone. 

Since the town gossip is incapacitated, word that he’s returned spreads marginally slower through Night Vale than it would otherwise. Still, by the afternoon, there’s a steady stream of visitors, well-wishers, and rubberneckers appearing at the apartment. Carlos is appointed gatekeeper while Cecil watches the snowy, cathode-ray television set and dozes on the couch. Whatever he’s watching makes no sense—it looks like a 1980s sitcom, except that the characters’ movements are jerky and their voices slightly out of sync with the images, and they are all carrying Ziplock bags full of pale, pinkish fluid—Carlos tries, once, to get Cecil to explain it, but he just shrugs and says, “Channel 6. _You know._ ”

Carlos doesn’t know, but he accepts. Cecil manages to remain upbeat and gracious, even though he’s groggy from the high-octane painkillers Teddy Williams has him on. He chatters on about the bowling league with Teddy as the doctor stitches his wounds and chides Carlos for waiting so long to call him. He lets Old Woman Josie fuss over him. He’s even reasonably polite to Steve Carlsberg, who stays sheepishly behind Carol and Janice, holding a Tupperware container full of scones and a bouquet of carnivorous flowers. His gregariousness spills over into childlike delight when Dana arrives with Khoshekh twined around her shoulders, and he’s finally reunited with his cat, which tumbles out of her grip to sit in Cecil’s lap, purring the soul-chilling purr of a thousand furious hornets.

Carlos’s eyes are watering, which has everything to do with his allergies and nothing at all to do with the quite frankly adorable sight of Cecil tearfully cooing into the fur of the nightmare entity. He silently promises that he will cope with the sinus hell and the risk of encountering exotic neurotoxins for the rest of his life if it means Cecil’s happiness.

“Station Management said you could keep him here until you were back on your feet,” Dana says. “At least, I think that’s what they meant. It was hard to understand through the chittering.” She sits down in the armchair and strokes the cat’s head, carefully avoiding his venom sacs. Carlos retreats to the kitchen and lets them catch up on municipal political strife and the daily trials and tribulations of the radio station. Carlos has already endured more social interaction in one day than he can typically stomach in a month, but this is important to Cecil, it’s important to the town, and anyway, he needs to call the remnants of his team and ask them to start moving the lab from the shabby building beside Big Rico’s to its new facility.

He doesn’t notice that the intern death tally in the living room has ceased until Dana joins him in the kitchen. “He’s asleep,” Dana says. Carlos glances over, and, yeah, Cecil’s curled up on the couch around Khoshekh, the cat kneading his forearm with his one remaining front paw, and he _will_ find an antihistamine that works or sneeze himself to death trying, because it’s basically the cutest thing he’s ever seen. 

“Did you know,” Dana tells him, conversationally, “that I can order a quarantine zone around your entire block? No one could get in or out without authorization. Not even the cat. I have that power.”

Carlos leans against the counter and crosses his arms. “Am I that obvious?”

“You want to be alone with him. It’s completely understandable.”

“Thanks for offering to abuse your seat of office for me,” Carlos says, and she smirks. “I’ll cope. He’s worth it.” There’s more he could say. Cecil keeps him grounded in a way that no one else has ever managed to do, but it’s Night Vale that keeps Cecil grounded, and so he has come to love it too, in the way that a new language sits awkwardly on the tongue but can still express what can’t be said in the old.

Dana hugs him. “I’m glad,” she says, her words muffled into his shirt. “You know we’re here for you too, right?” 

“Right,” he says, though, no, he didn’t know.

“You have friends here, Carlos. Don’t forget that.”

It becomes necessary to remind himself of this when, a few days later, Earl Harlan manages to get an afternoon off from Tourniquet and knocks on the door with a takeout bag that’s squirming. Carlos hasn’t met the man before; he’s tall and broad-shouldered, with the kind of effortless good looks that graced the covers of the Marvel comics that weedy, bullied Carlos kept under his bed as a kid. His very appearance in the living room earns Cecil’s bright, unguarded smile.

Which is to say, despite the fact that Earl has done absolutely nothing wrong—beyond, of course, his apparently mind-blowing culinary prowess and the fact that he had sex with Cecil before Carlos did—Carlos has to actively work to not hate him on sight.

Carlos is really usually not that petty, except that he’s been through an _ordeal_ and he is not exactly at his best. He tells himself that it’s good that Cecil has friends. He is grateful that Cecil has a past that has shaped him into the person he is now, because otherwise, he’d be a blank slate for Carlos to project his needs on. He’s even—in the abstract—thankful that Cecil has had other lovers. But Earl makes a concerted effort to be nice to Carlos and include him in the conversation, which just adds water to the sulfuric acid of his jealousy.

Old Woman Josie, who is puttering around the kitchen, says, “You’re out of ice cream. Carlos, dear, would you come with me?”

Carlos casts a helpless glance at Cecil and Earl. He hasn’t left Cecil’s side since they returned; since he can’t sleep anymore, even unconsciousness hasn’t separated them. They’ve been in near-constant physical contact; Cecil needs constant reassurances that he is corporeal, and Carlos craves the reminder just as much. Intellectually, he knows that at some point Cecil will go back to NVCR and he’ll go to his new lab, but he’s not sure he’s ready to let go yet, not with Cecil’s gorgeous ex hanging around.

Josie whispers conspiratorially, “If you bring him back a carton of pulque ice cream from White Sand, I promise you he will never so much as _look_ at anyone else. When did you last leave this apartment?” 

Carlos sighs and kisses the top of Cecil’s head. “I won’t be long. Call if there’s anything.”

“There’s always _something,_ Carlos. Without _something,_ there’s only Void.” 

Josie’s right; it’s a beautiful day. She hooks her thin arm through his, the sun warm and pulsing in upbeat, synthesized bursts. Appreciative of his need for silence, she buys them both ice cream cones and they sit on the picnic bench outside of the shop.

“I know what it’s like,” Josie says. There’s a whole story there—apparently, one that involves time-travelling bloodstones, and love, and the inevitable death that ends any story that goes on for long enough—but this is not the day she’s willing to tell it. Instead she says, “The townsfolk aren’t always the most…accepting.”

“Neither is the town,” Carlos points out.

“Things will change,” Josie says. “Not right away, of course. That kinda change isn’t what you’re looking for anyway. But you have a role now, a purpose. You were _chosen_.” 

“By the angels?”

Josie winks. “Them too.” She digs an old, faded photograph out of her purse. “I brought this along for you. I thought Cecil might want to see it, but he’s not ready, I guess. Maybe he never will be.”

There are two couples in the photo—one, he recognizes as a much younger Josie, with a man Carlos assumes is her late husband. The other two, a thin, pale woman, holding a small baby in her arms, and a fat, dark man. Everyone is smiling. The photo looks too old for the baby to be Cecil, but he has the woman’s nose and the man’s frizzy hair and dark eyes, so maybe color photography came later to Night Vale than it did to the rest of the world, or Cecil is older than he looks. Carlos wouldn’t rule either out.

It’s a relief, given the brief, painful snippets Cecil remembers from his past, to find out that, at least for at the beginning, his parents loved him.

“He doesn’t remember his father,” Carlos muses. “He barely remembers his mother.” 

“He remembers all kinds of things,” Josie replies. “That’s different than being able to say them out loud. Look at it out of the corner of your eye.”

Carlos doesn’t want to, and for good reason. When he does, Josie’s husband is gone and she looks different, taller and heavier, and Cecil’s mother is holding the baby in the opposite direction. The smiles look wooden, desperate. Behind them, above the horizon, is a black circle, as if someone has burned a hole right through the photo.

He blinks, and it goes back to normal. “What does it mean?”

“Damned if I know,” Josie puts the photo away. “That he’s set apart, like you and me, and that everything is always gonna be harder because of that. You should understand, son. He didn’t have a choice, not with fate or destiny or what have you. No one ever does, and Cecil got less choice than most. But you? You’re what he got to choose.” 

Carlos finishes his ice cream cone. His phone reaches out a tendril that politely taps him on the leg; he looks down to see a text from Cecil. It’s string of emoji: a contemplative dinosaur skeleton, two small worms pretending to be one large worm, and anthropomorphic cayenne peppers engaged in an act which Carlos—while he’s a scientist, not a botanist—is not actually how cayenne peppers procreate. For the first time he can remember, he laughs. He swings Josie to her feet. 

“I think I’m needed,” he says. “Let’s get home before the ice cream melts.”

 

* * *

 

“Of course, the readjustment period has been difficult. I do not know what has become of Lauren Mallard or her plans for our little town. I do not know that we are truly safe from StrexCorp or its Smiling God.” He pauses, his third eye widening. “No, the Sheriff’s Secret Police has just informed me that we are most certainly _not_ safe, that safety is an illusion that encourages a dangerous complacency, and that we must remain eternally vigilant.

Cells are born, and die, and there is no guarantee that the person you said goodbye to last time you saw him is the person you are saying hello to now.”

 

* * *

 

“This is,” Cecil declares to the television, “ _subversively_ inaccurate. I don’t know why they allow this sort of misinformation to be broadcast. _Children_ could be watching.” 

“Mmm-hmm.” Carlos traces circles around the closest of the tentacles peeking out from under his bathrobe. He lost interest in the Mars Rover documentary half an hour ago; the obscure scientific phenomenon sprawled out over the couch with his head in Carlos’s lap is far more interesting, and besides, he’s seen this one before.

“Just ‘mmm-hmm’? You’re not going to try to argue the existence of imaginary mountains on an imaginary planet?”

Carlos smiles indulgently. “Mars is a lie too?”

“There’s a film studio where they—ohh.” Cecil wriggles onto his side to allow Carlos better access to the dorsal slit a few inches from his spine where the tentacle begins. Several of the other tendrils seem interested, coiling around Carlos’s thigh and gently pulsating. Encouraged, he rubs the tentacle’s base, and Cecil moans appreciatively. 

After nearly a week of recuperation, Cecil’s various cuts and bruises have mostly faded and Teddy’s tapered off his pain medication, but he’s still sore and shaky, and Carlos remains terrified of breaking him. That said, after nearly a week of recuperation, Cecil is also stir-crazy and, apparently, turned on by Carlos’s Olympus Mons-inspired heresy. He slides up the back of the couch, mumbling something about invisible volcanoes, and sucks at Carlos’s neck, pulling the collar of his t-shirt down to tongue at his collarbone. One of the tentacles slides over his hip and down the front of his jeans. 

“Christ, Cecil.” Cecil’s been too weak to do much beyond lie in bed and be cuddled, and that’s so much more than Carlos had ever thought he’d get to do again that he’s forgotten just how amazingly _hot_ his boyfriend can be. It’s not the first time he’s made the mistake of assuming Cecil is more innocent than he is—during their early, fumbling encounters, he’d gone from blushing and saying “gosh” a lot to working Carlos into screaming orgasms in about as much time as Carlos required to explain the concept of tentacle hentai to him. Still, damage is damage, and Cecil has been through a lot. He puts a steadying hand on Cecil’s shoulder. “You should be resting,” he says. “In bed.” 

Cecil’s teeth tug at his lower lip, and the tip of a tentacle flicks against his balls. His voice drops about an octave, just short of commanding. “Take me to bed, then.”

Carlos scoops him up and carries him to the bedroom. Khoshekh leaps off the pillow with a disgruntled screech. Cecil’s tentacles twine around Carlos, dragging him closer; one of his hands slides through the thick fuzz on his scalp, down the back of his neck. His other hand fiddles with the fly of Carlos’s jeans.

“I don’t want to hurt you,” Carlos protests between crushing kisses.

“You won’t.” Cecil’s eyes meet his, Void-deep and guileless. “It’s been _so long_.” 

Carlos is quickly divested of various articles of clothing and positioned so that he’s kneeling above Cecil, suspended by the mass of tentacles writhing around him. He’s painfully hard just from the teasing touches snaking across his body, but he’s determined to be slow and careful. He parts the folds of Cecil’s robe and rakes his nails lightly over Cecil’s thighs. Cecil keens in frustration. “Shh,” Carlos murmurs. “I’ll make you feel good. Just relax.” The tentacle around his waist loosens to let him move, and he trails soft kisses over the swirling ridges of ritual scars, tonguing the runes in a pattern he hopes isn’t some sort of sacrilege, then dips his head to take Cecil into his mouth. 

Cecil gasps his name and bucks his hips and berates him for being so cruel to keep him waiting _forever_ , and Carlos drowns in his voice as it cracks. Tentacles slither over him, tickling his sides and parting his legs. The tip of one curls around his dick and flexes, softly at first, then harder as Carlos murmurs muffled encouragement. Another slides into the corner of his mouth and unlatches it from Cecil’s cock; he licks a long stripe up the tendril’s underside and Cecil’s rambling, running monologue dissolves into incoherent, breathy cries. 

“I love you,” Carlos says, regretting—as he has so many times before—that he doesn’t have Cecil’s surplus of limbs, that he can’t make every part of Cecil’s body melt beneath his touch simultaneously. “God, Cecil, I love you so much.” He shifts the pillows underneath them so that Cecil’s back is supported and Carlos can straddle him without putting pressure on his bruised ribs.

“Tell me more about mountains,” Cecil says abruptly, running a finger over Carlos’s chest. 

“They’re, ah—” One of the tentacles, dripping with lube that Cecil’s retrieved from the bedside table, pushes inside of him, the strong muscle rippling. He falls forward with an electrified gasp. “—formed by shifts in the Earth’s crust, by folds and, uh, thrusts, and…” He fumbles for the tube and splashes a generous quantity over his own fingers. “—igneous intrusion.” 

He circles Cecil’s opening, drawing a shuddering moan from him, his attention on Cecil’s breathing and whether the soft noises he’s making are from pain or pleasure. Determining it’s the latter, he crooks a tentative finger inside of him and rubs gently, hoping that it feels as good as the tentacle does. “Okay?” 

“Perfect. Keep talking. On—ohh, yes, there—on Mars, too?”

“From volcanoes,” a second finger, stretching, and Cecil arches underneath him. “Erupting, and flowing…” Cecil whimpers, his tentacles bunching and undulating, filling him and coiling around him, and it’s all Carlos can do to concentrate on opening him wider, holding back his own release as long as he can.

“Oh, my kind, gorgeous, deluded-about-the-existence-of-mountains Carlos,” Cecil purrs in his ear. “Oh, _please.”_

No one would be able to resist that voice, velvety and thick with arousal, even without the ancient, incomprehensible power behind it. Carlos rolls on a condom and buries himself inside Cecil. The other man clings to him, enveloping him in serpentine loops that fill his mouth and ass and squeeze his cock so tightly he’s sure he’ll burst, certain that his every vital essence will come gushing out of him any second. Cecil’s face is wet where it’s pressed against his neck, and his body, soft and pliant and a little thinner than it had been last time they did this, trembles in a hum that vibrates through Carlos’s body as it gets louder.

The Voice shudders through both of the fragile human bodies like a struck tuning fork, a collision of flaming celestial spheres, a sound felt more than heard. He tenses and spills into Cecil without warning.

“Sorry!” he squeaks, and Cecil laughs. “It’s just, I mean, you’re very—” 

“ _Carlos…”_ The sound alone sends aftershocks rippling through him; he fists one hand around Cecil’s cock and slips the other into the nest of tentacles and squeezes and sucks everything he can reach until Cecil wails and finally collapses, spent, in his arms.

Carlos strokes one of the limp tentacles, which truncates in an ugly, bulbous mess of scars. There are little red suction marks all over his own body, already beginning to fade; he touches their source lovingly. “You’ve ruined me, you know,” he murmurs. “Not just for other men, but for doing anything other than this, ever.”

Cecil grins up at him, says, “Neat,” and flails over to the bedside table for a stack of papers and a lump of conté crayon. “That’s wonderful, dear Carlos, _you_ are wonderful. I’ll have to inform _them,_ of course.” Carlos, who had managed to mostly forget about Post-Coital Reports, is both grateful that Cecil is willing to take that on and bemused that a chaotic entity like the Voice would choose a mortal vessel so beholden to the town’s strict sense of order. He hands the papers off to a bedpost that, as it turns out, is not a bedpost after all. (Night Vale may be pleased to have them back, but that doesn’t mean that it’s about to grant them privacy. He hopes that the Sheriff’s Secret Police enjoyed the show.) 

Cecil yawns and burrows against his chest. “Maybe the Erikas can fix what StrexCorp did,” he says. “I liked sleeping with you.” 

Carlos runs his fingers through Cecil’s hair. “I don’t know if I want them to. I can get a lot more science done this way. And I can, er—” Heat rises to his cheeks; he’s glad Cecil’s eyes are all closed. “I can guard you. When you’re asleep. Keep you safe.”

To his credit, Cecil doesn’t tell him how pointless that is. He winds a tentacle around Carlos’s waist. “I’d like that,” he says quietly, and Carlos holds him until he drifts off.

 

* * *

 

“And so,” Cecil says. “There is nothing left to do but rebuild our beautiful little town. Well. Once the quarantine has been lifted and we can stop huddling in our homes in abject terror, that is. Wait a moment. Something is pounding at the door…” He definitely recognizes the sound. It’s the kind of scream emitted by a mouth that has had its tongue removed. Probably bitten off by scorpion lice. “Listeners, I’m going to go investigate. In the meantime, I take you to [the weather](http://lalforest.bandcamp.com/track/another-sun).”

 

* * *

 

Mission Grove Park is full of the shrieks of children playing, which is different than the usual shrieks of children cowering beneath an inscrutable alien sky. City Council voted to declare an extra Saturday—while it won’t admit it’s in honor of Cecil’s return to NVCR, it’s _totally_ in honor of Cecil’s return to NVCR—and Tamika loves Dana all the more for it. After Megan Wallaby’s secret swearing-in ceremony in the Sand Wastes, Tamika elects to spend her extra day here, on an afternoon that lasts three minutes longer than it should, watching her Book Club fly kites with Janice and her friends. 

Janice has earned her Tactical Apparel Design badge in time for Megan to wear the new dress she has sewn—which has a number of hidden compartments for weapons and ammunition, but also a delicate floral pattern that complements Megan’s pale skin tone—to the ceremony and the park afterwards. Carlos tells her that she looks pretty, and Megan blushes from hand to face, then skips happily to join the others. The kites, stark against the blue sky, dive and peck at each other; one manages to catch a live sparrow. 

Tamika sits on the bench and watches her friends play. She doesn’t belong with them, not really. She knows her role is at the frontline when there’s a war to be fought, but right now, there’s only a lazy afternoon, and it’s easier to be with Carlos and Cecil, who ask nothing from her until she’s ready to speak. 

She’s visited their apartment a few times, and they’ve never talked about anything that happened in Desert Bluffs. She’s not ready either, but soon enough they’ll both be back to their jobs and she’ll lose her chance. 

“I think I figured it out,” she says, when the kids are too engrossed watching the kites fight to overhear. “What the hooded figures took.”

Cecil nods for her to continue. Both men have lost something too, but they are obvious things, like body parts and sleep and the life of a man who, under other circumstances, Cecil might have been. Still, Tamika thinks, they’ll understand more than anyone else she knows.

“Time passes so quickly, doesn’t it?” It’s not true this afternoon, which is slow and sultry, and it isn’t exactly true for Cecil, who’s been the same vague middle age that he is for as long as Tamika can remember, but it’s true for her. “I’m in ninth grade now, and then it’s three more years, and the nth grade, and—college, I guess. I don’t know how that happens. My mom wants me to apply out of state. She thinks it’s safer, I guess. I can’t imagine living anywhere else. When I thought I couldn’t go back…” Past the low dune, Janice rolls her way down a paved path, Deanna chasing after her with her arms waving. Both girls are laughing, at least up until Janice’s kite chews a hole in Deanna’s. “I think they took my childhood.”

“Can they do that?” Carlos asks.

“They can definitely do that,” Cecil says, shuddering. Tamika wonders what they’ve taken from him in the past.

“I guess it’s not a big deal,” Tamika says. “Given that I went into the Dog Park. But…there was so little of it left. Why would they even want it?” 

Cecil pats her hand, though he’s focused, as ever, on Carlos. “Sometimes, when there isn’t much of something, it’s even more valuable. I’m sorry, Tamika. It wasn’t right, that you had to lose that for me.”

“I don’t mind,” she says quickly. She’d be willing to give a lot more—he’d ripped apart time to save her, after all. “I just don’t know what I’m gonna do now. I don’t have to be the general of a militia forever, do I? There’s no prophecy about it.”

“Not that I know of,” Cecil says.

“I’m a good writer,” Tamika says. “Maybe I could intern at NVCR—”

Cecil grins. “Sure, that’d be swell!” and Carlos kicks his foot. “Ah, or, maybe we have a really long waiting list for spots and your talents would be best applied somewhere less inherently fatal?” 

“Are you any good at science?” Carlos asks. Tamika shrugs. She’s never thought of herself as a scientist, but she’s invented a slingshot that kills people with projectile literature, so there’s that. “We could use a student in the lab. And given our new ownership, I could probably get you access to Marcus Vanston’s—sorry, _Erika’s_ —private library.”

“That would be _amazing_ ,” she says, picturing herself amid stacks of virgin books with spines un-cracked and pages un-bloodied, every scrap of forbidden knowledge at her fingertips. The weight of grief shouldn’t be lifted so easily, and it isn’t in any permanent way. But right now, in Mission Grove Park, surrounded by those she loves, it cracks enough to admit light, and Tamika watches the sinking sun before running into the dunes after her friends.

 

* * *

 

“Well,” Cecil says brightly. “We survived. The scorpion lice infestation, and everything else.” The studio door cracks open, the rusty hinges creaking despite the intruder’s best efforts to keep quiet. “Other than the people who died, of course. To the family and friends of Intern Yosef…”

Carlos stalks across the floor, mindful that the microphone doesn’t pick up the tread of his shoes. Cecil leans back far enough in his chair to glimpse his upside-down boyfriend trying to be subtle.

“Night Vale,” he says, “once again owes a debt of gratitude to our favorite scientist, who _heroically_ defeated the plague and averted a much wider epidemic, and who just so _happens_ to be with me in the studio right now. Carlos, care to comment?” He waves the microphone above his shoulder. Carlos promptly ignores it and wraps his arms around Cecil from behind, kissing his neck. Cecil can’t entirely suppress a squeal. “Sorry listeners,” he adds, gazing up in adoration at the man he loves more than anything else in the world. “We’re out of time. Stay tuned for the rustling of clothes being stripped off, followed by heavy panting. _AndgoodnightNightValegoodnight.”_

 

* * *

 

Somewhere in a desert that is not this one—but is not far from it, either—a woman emerges from the rubble. 

The laboratory is a wreck of melted steel and twisted rebar, concrete walls and floor shattered in the Subtle Bomb’s last death throes. She is a wreck herself, her sleek hair mussed and her sharp suit torn to shreds in the blast. But destruction is not, in itself, an ending.

Lauren Mallard steps briskly over the corpses and folds her arms over her chest. She stares at the smoldering ruin. If anything of the Smiling God’s relic hasn’t burned itself out, it’s gone cold within its lifeless shell.

“Well,” she says—not to the dead weapon, and not to the Smiling God, but to the invisible ears of Head Office. “This didn’t achieve the outputs specified in the growth-share matrix now, did it?” Her broken fingernails rasp over the casing. “I hope you’ll listen to me next time I suggest we diversify.”

As if to answer her, to mock her faithlessness, the ground heaves in a rumbling echo. She braces herself against the weapon, already rusting beneath her palms, golden laughter spilling from her scarlet lips. “This doesn’t need to be defeat,” she says. “After all, what is more lucrative than a crisis? Shall we talk?”

This time, the floor, thick with congealing blood, and the walls, which radiate no warmth, or light, or love, are still. The Smiling God’s desertion is a knife in the heart of every denizen of Desert Bluffs, but not to Lauren. There’s profit to be made, a new power structure to be formed, in the absence of hope.

Her head held high, she blows the humbled god a kiss. She swings out the door, squinting as she emerges into the sunlit desert beyond the building’s walls. The StrexCorp facility is a looming bulk behind her; before her, the town stirs into waking. 

Lauren lifts her head to the sky. Its light, pure and holy, seems to shine on her, and her alone. Free of shame, free of duty, she is ready to be unleashed upon the world.

“When you’re ready to strategize,” she promises, to whoever might be listening, “I’ll be waiting.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Holy Cthulhu, thank you to everyone who managed to read through this massive angstfest. You guys are lovelier than a litter of floating kittens.


End file.
